Quickflix boss: We’re through the funding crisis and ready to grow
The chairman of DVD rental and online streaming company Quickflix claims the company is poised for growth after riding out a difficult couple of months, which saw an exodus of senior staff and a major capital raising,
Stephen Langsford, chairman of Quickflix, told Mumbrella that last week’s injection of $1.7m from the Crede Capital Group will give the company the cash to capitalise on the growth on IPTV in Australia.
“We hit a funding crisis last year that precipitated a restructuring,” Langsford said. “We have made it clear that with the restructuring that there is an opportunity here to address our cost base, which had increased and we had to get that back to something that was sustainable.”
Langsford says the restructuring has seen Quickflix streamline its DVD rental business.
“In some instances those cost savings have been made through consolidating our physical DVD fulfilment centres and that means that we can drive economies of scale,” he said.
“We have a profitable DVD rental business, and obviously it’s still early days with streaming but can build profitability there.”
“In the US, people are consuming through DVD and Blu-ray and they will stream movies as well as part of an all I can view proposition… we can straddle the transition by being a dominant player in the DVD sector as well.”
Quickflix says that with the continued expansion of smart-TVs, tablets and other enable devices it is now poised to capitalise on the growth of the sector.
“We had a 20 per cent increase in (online) subscriptions in the December quarter and we are now in a position where we can manage the business and still expose ourselves to enormous upside through the addressable market.”
Langsford also said he was not concerned about the departure of a number of senior executives from the company. In November, last year as the company hit cash flow problems, former Telstra media executives Justin Milne and CEO Chris Taylor departed and HBO’s board member resigned.
Chief innovation officer Tim Parsons also departed last week to join Mi9 but says he will remain an adviser to Quickflix.
“We’ve had very good people involved with Quikflix and we continue to. Having staged the restructuring and turnaround we are now in some instances hiring people, said Langsford.
Nic Christensen
Linkedin
Right.
So they retrenched a 1/3 of staff and lost another 1/3 at least. The money isn’t enough to buy them back goodwill from terrible content.
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Hope they can pull through and thrive. A compeditive and healthy Quickflix is good for the market.
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The worm has turned for quickflix. They are poised to prosper in growth industry. Looking foward to seeing the new content available this year.
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I hope that Quickflix pulls through to. However its important to reflect where that extra cash has come from. All current Quickflix shareholders have had their stake diluted in the share issue to the new investor. But that is ok if from here management turns qf into a growing and profitable company
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Another player is about to enter the market place and potentially throw a spanner in the Quickflix works. Get set for some good old fashioned competition. Oh and the new player is an Australian group.
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really? how many times have we heard this story? you cant count free trial subscribers as an increase in customers even if you do need to make pretty numbers for investors.
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The December quarterly report clearly differentiated between trialists and paying customers. Quickflix is here to stay…although some would like to think otherwise.
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Digital customer experience manager….entertainment company. Advertisement this page.
Langsford says they are hiring. I believe him.
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very interesting comment Jenna, its high time Foxtel had some quality competition. any more hints on who the new competitor might be?
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you are right, nick. they declare gift cards and trial customers who pay a nominal fee as “paying customers” to make it look like the company is growing… and even in doing so, paying customer numbers have decreased 2 out of the last 3 quarters…
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@Jo – happy to reveal to Mumbrella when they are ready to launch. But very exciting changes for Australians frustrated with the offerings on free to air and subscription TV as it will truly be TV on demand. Oh and not just catch up TV.
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I joined for their 2-week free trial and then left the service after that.
Not worth it, not that great, lots of buffering when streaming, lousy content that you can get free elsewhere, poor customer service who do not answer phone or emails.
Took me a long time to unsubscribe until I threaten a lawsuit with expensive lawyer costs and they cancelled my subscription the next day.
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David and Nick,
You guys should have a look at the graph on page 4 of the December 2012 half year report.
http://investor.quickflix.com......cialReport
It has one entry for “Total Customers 129,032…and another for total paying customers – 119,520.
It shows increasing revenues and paying customers.
It’s all there in the report if you have a look.
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coco, the point is that the paying customer numbers include trialists. and forget the half yearly report. if you look at the last 3 quarterly reports you will see that only one of those quarters had an increase in paying customer numbers
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David, not sure why I should forget the half yearly report?
Don’t want to go cherry picking my info.
From the December Quarterly – “Both total and paying customers remained steady during the quarter finishing at 129,032 and 119,520 respectively.”
I’m guessing that the blue bars in the bar marked ” “Paying Customers” refers to Paying Customers, while the white bars marked “Trialists” refers to the trialists……..Just a hunch of mine I suppose.
http://investor.quickflix.com......cember2012
In the June quarterly the trialists are marked in light blue, while the paying customers are shown in dark blue.
http://investor.quickflix.com......cialReport
At 30 June 2012, total customers reached 118,724, an increase of 44 percent for the year.
Paying customers increased by 59 percent in the year to 111,391.
Seems to show growth in paying cusomers to me!
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They also include group buying ie scoopon etc offers in their paying customer base.
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it’s all here coco – http://www.smarthouse.com.au/C.....y/L7M7S5W5
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hi nick, i would be interested in talking with you about the paying customer numbers, can you email me – davidcannon@xtra.co.nz
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