All Over The World

Here at Movie Beach we’ve always felt that, whatever the question, “it’s out in the world” was a pretty good answer. There’s no substitute for travelling, living and working in different countries, making friends and interacting with people all over the world. Some people have an urge to travel and do new things and some don’t, but we think it’s just a simple necessity.

Our business has humble origins but throw in a couple of lifetimes of travelling the world, a company base in Singapore and significant time spent working out of mobile HQ’s in Asia, the Bahamas, Los Angeles and Europe and we like to think the world is our oyster. We’re not suggesting that we’ve got all the answers or a finger on every pulse, but in our daily business we do like to think “how would people in, say, Korea, see that” and “where is the best place in the world for us to be doing this job”. There’s never a simple answer and these days when you can do many jobs from almost anywhere you need to evaluate whether you actually need a physical community around you to achieve your goals. Of course it’s much more pleasant working with friends and colleagues around but you can build new teams around your efforts and sometimes you can make the most impact by being right out on the edge seeing things for yourself.

We’re currently looking at a couple of new fund projects in China and South-East Asia, as well as a potential new regional Asia fund and a couple of movie deals in Thailand and Japan. Our China discussions are proceeding well with our keystone investor still on board to kick things off. We may get to Beijing to shake hands on that one, which would be a blast. Another regional Asia fund deal has come back to life when we thought it at best dormant, and that may give us the chance to combine both the Singapore and Hollywood ends of our business. It seems as if Asia’s always calling us.

Today it was reported that global box-office revenues increased 7.6% to $29.9Bn in 2009, another record year in the international movie sector. Europe still dominates international revenue but the biggest increase, of 12.3%, was in the Asia Pacific region where new technologies and screens are busily rolling out. The movie sector still presents the great investment opportunity we keep going on about.

The Out Of Obscurity team.