Moving Image Technologies today announced the results for its third quarter ended March 31, 2024.
“As expected, the long tail of the actors and writers strike in late 2023 impacted our third quarter results,” said Phil Rafnson, chairman and chief executive officer of MIT. “The strikes impacted the industry year to date for several reasons, including the lower 2024 domestic box office, which analysts expect to be flat to down, and budgeting delays at many of our customers. Specifically, we have seen multiple projects and orders pushed out into future quarters. Additionally, our quarterly financial results were affected by a large order for seats, which have a significantly lower gross margin than the Company average, and the negative side to having strong operating leverage.
“While we expect the industry hangover to continue into our fourth fiscal quarter, we have seen new recent activity that gives us reasons for optimism. First, we finished field testing for LEA’s smart power amps with a top-10 circuit, and the results were promising. We also began testing these products at another top-10 circuit and hope to start field testing at two other top-10 circuits over the next few quarters. While we have had some early success scoping LEA products into new cinema builds, keep in mind the attrition market for LEA smart power amplifiers represents a $30-60 million annual [total available market] in North America for us to penetrate over time.
“Behind the scenes, we continue moving forward with our emerging product lines. Our E-caddy concept was well received by the handful of Major League Baseball and other sports stadium executives we met and is now expected to move into the early manufacturing and testing stage during our fourth quarter. Here, we also had some recent positive news on the hardware side related to power consumption, which could materially expand the range of services we can offer.
“For CineQC, the [software as a service] quality control and management platform that we license and resell into cinema, the broader rollout has been delayed due to needing a more robust system. While we’ve been co-developing with our paying customer, at zero expense to us, after a thorough evaluation, we decided the underlying technology needs alterations to scale, and we plan to significantly upgrade the technology, which should take approximately two quarters to complete. When finished, we expect to have direct control of the technology and a path to finally market the offering more broadly.
“For Esports, we’ve pivoted recently to take a parallel approach with certain larger potential customers while SNDBX is working to raise growth capital. If successful, we believe this could help scale our Esports business more quickly.”