Sathyam Cinemas to have 25 more screens in South by March next

Sathyam Cinemas is expanding its chain across the South with an additional 25 screens by March 2018.

Sathyam Cinemas currently has 50 screens across Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Kerala, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana and Maharashtra. Swaroop Reddy, President, said the company is looking to strengthen its presence in the South with new launches planned in Puducherry, Hyderabad, Bengaluru and Mumbai in the next 9-12 months.

The company is also looking to grow beyond metros and will look at tier-II cities in Telangana, Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu. “We see strong movie-going population in these regions,” Reddy said. Places under consideration are Guntur, Tirupati, Nizamabad, Madurai, Salem, Tiruchi and Vellore. The company already has presence in Coimbatore and Warangal.

“Till date metros contribute to chunk of the business,” he said. But that does not mean tier-II towns do not have the potential,” Reddy added.

The company, which sees close to 8 lakh bookings on average per month, has been expanding rapidly for the past one year beyond its home ground Chennai. After launching a single screen in Mumbai last year, it expanded to Kerala, Karnataka and Telangana in the last few months.

While the player is a household name in Chennai, others are a new territory. Reddy agrees that market dynamics is different compared to Tamil Nadu, which has a pricing cap of ₹120. “We have flexible prices and create a different dynamics based on that, especially in Mumbai,” he said. The screens have different prices ranging from ₹100 to ₹350, which is attractive. “So far we have been doing well,” he added.

With more in the pipeline, Reddy said the expansion is not sudden rather the company had wanted to go beyond Chennai as long as 10 years ago. “It is only now everything is falling in place,” he added.

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