PVR Cinemas

PVR

Type	Public NSE: PVR BSE: 532689
Industry	Entertainment (movie theatres)
Founded	June 1997
Headquarters	Block A, 4th Floor, Building No. 9 DLF Cyber City, Phase II Gurgaon, Haryana, India
Number of locations	93
Key people	Ajay Bijli (Executive Chairman of the Board & Managing Director)
Website	www.pvrcinemas.com

Priya Village Roadshow (PVR) Cinemas is one of the cinema chains in India. The Company, which began as a joint venture agreement between Priya Exhibitors Private Limited and Village Roadshow Limited in 1995 with 60:40 ratio, began its commercial operations in June 1997 with the launch of PVR Anupam in Saket, India's first multiplex. Priya Exhibitors were the owners of the Priya theatre in Basant Lok Market, and they acquired Anupam Theatre in Saket and under PVR launched a multiplex.

History

PVR Saket

The Bijli family were the owners of PVR. In 1992, Ajay Bijli's father died at the age of 60. Then in 1994, a fire broke out in the family's trucking company's godown spread over 1,00,000 square feet.

A distributor of Hollywood films put him in touch with Village Roadshow, which wanted to expand in India. Although it was initially undertaken to renovate the Vasant Vihar hall and to convert Priya into a multiplex, but Ajay Bijli began to look for another location and zeroed in on Anupam, in South Delhi’s Saket area, which was extremely dilapidated at the time. Bijli took it on lease and converted it into a four-plex, sowing the seeds of the multiplex phenomenon in the country.

In 2003, Renuka Ramnath, the head of private equity fund ICICI Venture, took the final call in favour of investing Rs 40 crore in Bijli’s PVR Ltd in March 2003 when Australia’s Village Roadshow, had decided to pull out of India and 17 other countries.^[1] On 29 November 2012, PVR Cinemas bought 69.27% of the shares of CineMAX from its promoter for 395 crore Rupees, making PVR the largest Cinema-chain in India.^[2]

Locations

PVR Vikaspuri

Currently PVR controls 398 screens in 93 locations across 38 Indian Cities. It plans to open 500 screens by 2015.^[3] PVR commands a significant presence in New Delhi and NCR with 55 screens in 16 multiplexes. PVR also has a strong presence in Chandigarh, Bhopal, Ludhiana, Nagpur, Chennai, Lucknow, Indore, Hyderabad, Bangalore, Mumbai, Nanded, Ahmedabad, Kochi, Udaipur, Vijayawada and Visakhapatnam. PVR recently launched its premium brand, PVR Premiere, targeted at urban consumers in metros, with the opening of PVR Select Citywalk in Select Citywalk. The company operates three other brands, PVR Talkies, the no-frills cinemas for consumers in tier II cities, the original PVR Cinemas targeted at the urban & semi-urban consumers and PVR Director's Cut for ultra luxury watching.

PVR opened cinema halls in Ambience Mall, Gurgaon in 2007 named "PVR Ambience Premier" as India's first ^{[citation needed]} 2K Dolby Digital Multiplex with five Premier Class auditoria and two Gold Class auditoria.

References

External links

• PVR Cinemas official website