MUMBAI: Prime Focus Limited (PFL), a global provider of creative and technical post production services for broadcast, commercials and films, will receive $35 million in equity investment from Standard Chartered Private Equity (Mauritius) to support its growth plans.

The company is also in talks with lenders to raise long term debt to support redemption of $55 million of FCCBs (foreign currency convertible bonds) towards the end of this year.

The equity investment by Standard Chartered Private Equity will be via allotment of equity shares on a preferential basis at Rs 53 per share.

Prime Focus MD & CEO Ramki Sankaranarayanan said the equity investment will make Standard Chartered Private Equity a long term partner in the company.

In addition, the company will issue equity warrants to its promoter Namit Malhotra, representing a right to subscribe to equity shares, for an aggregate amount of Rs 1.04 billion on a preferential basis. These warrants are convertible into equity shares at a maximum price of Rs. 53 per share.

PFL shares closed 0.94 per cent up at Rs 53.65 on Thursday on the National Stock Exchange.

PFL has convened an extraordinary shareholders‘ meeting (EGM) on 3 November to seek shareholders‘ approval for these equity transactions.

According to PFL, investment by Standard Chartered Private Equity marks an important milestone for the company, and will go a long way in helping the company to sustain its future growth plans.

PFL has a team of over 4,500 people with state-of-the-art facilities across the key markets of North America, the UK and India.

The company also said that promoter Namit Malhotra‘s investment in the company reinforces the promoter‘s continued commitment towards the business.

Sankaranarayanan said for the redemption of FCCBs, the company is in a fairly advanced stage of negotiation with various lenders for long term loans.

MUMBAI: Prime Focus Limited has posted a consolidated net profit of Rs 992.5 million for the fiscal ended 31 March 2012, a 30.4 per cent jump compared to Rs 760.9 million a year ago.

The company?s net income jumped 53.5 per cent to Rs 7.72 billion during the fiscal, compared to the Rs 5.03 billion that the company posted in FY?11.

Prime Focus? Ebitda also went up 24.9 per cent to Rs 588.2 million, compared to Rs 470.8 million in the year-ago period.

Prime Focus MD & CEO Ramki Sankaranarayanan said, ?Our strategy on 3D is continuing to work, with the unparalleled success of the theatrical release of the new and old 3D titles worldwide. Whether it is Star Wars, Avengers, Wrath of the Titans, Immortals, Titanic or Men in Black 3, all have significant collections worldwide, putting the rest to argument whether theatrical 3D is viable business or not. Noteworthy, is the success of the 3D release of the library titles? with our market dominant position, bodes very well for the growth momentum in the next year as well.?

?Our VFX business has also witnessed growth as we leverage our strong relationships with Hollywood studios to increase our share in the $5 billion market. We continue to invest to grow the global digital pipeline across Vancouver, London, Hollywood and Indian VFX content creation studios, bringing in clients the best mix of talent, scale and technology, delivering projects, like Men In Black 3, Immortals, or the currently ongoing Dredd.?

PFL is a global visual entertainment services group that provides creative and technical services to the film, broadcast, and advertising market.

MUMBAI: Prime Focus Technologies (PFT) has further extended its content localisation offering with a raft of language dubbing services.

This new language dubbing service complements PFT?s existing subtitling-captioning service offering that is already captioning over 10,500 hours of TV and film content every year. 

Founder and CEO of Prime Focus Technologies Ramki Sankaranarayanan said, "With rapid globalisation, international content is in increasing demand by a geographically dispersed, digitally interactive consumer base. Leveraging our global digital pipeline, language dubbing is an important addition to our growing suite of powerful Clear-led content operation services for global clients. We are very pleased to see our clients already embracing this offering which clearly presents enhanced revenue growth opportunities."

With a roster of 300 voiceover artists and 50 scriptwriters, PFT can provide dubbing services in over 20 international languages and all Indian languages. PFT?s services include scriptwriting; cultural and language disaster checks; dialogue adaptation; voice casting and audition; dialogue recording and editing; M&E track creation; audio mixing; video editing; and Dolby mastering.

The new service is managed by a client servicing team with many years of content localisation experience and leverages Clear, PFT?s award-winning hybrid cloud content operations platform, to handle assets, automated QC, approvals, workflows, delivery and archiving of the content.

PFT is already providing over 250 hours of dubbing services every month to its clients like National Geographic Channel, Reliance Big, Star TV and Zee TV.