Lionsgate's fiscal-year DVD sales rise 5%

Studio has quarterly loss as revenue falls

By Danny King -- Video Business, 6/1/2009

JUNE 1 | PHYSICAL: Lionsgate said its fiscal 2009 home-entertainment sales rose 5% on titles such as Saw V and Tyler Perry's The Family That Preys, though the independent studio took a fourth-quarter loss on lower overall sales.

Home-entertainment revenue for the year ended March 31 was $675.6 million, up 4.7% from $645.1 million, a year earlier. In addition to improved film DVD sales, home-entertainment revenue from television shows such as Weeds and Mad Men jumped 62% to $34.9 million, the company said. Overall, the company's U.S. market share of DVD sales was about 8.2% for the early part of this year, Lionsgate executives said on a conference call with analysts.

Lionsgate, which isn't disclosing DVD sales for the quarter ended March 31, had two of the Top 10 rented U.S. DVDs of the quarter, including No. 5 My Best Friend's Girl and No. 9 Bangkok Dangerous, according to data compiled by Video Business and Rentrak. Saw V was Lionsgate's top seller of the quarter.

"If the economy picks up, packaged media will hold steady," Lionsgate President Steve Beeks said on the conference call. "Within a few years, digital will provide replacement revenue at a substantially higher margin."

Still, overall, Lionsgate had a fiscal fourth-quarter loss of $28.6 million, or 25¢ a share, compared to net income of $29.8 million, or 26¢, a year earlier, as revenue fell 9.5% to $463.2 million. The company took a $16 million write-down on the value of a distribution agreement Lionsgate signed with U.K.-based children's programming publisher Hit Entertainment last March because of lower sales largely stemming from shrinking shelf space allotted to children's DVD titles by retailers. 

The company was expected to lose 11¢ a share on $445.6 million in sales, the average analyst estimates in a Thomson Reuters poll.