Cinedigm Expands the Team

by Kris_Tuttle on January 13, 2011

Back in Novem­ber we pub­lished our first note on Cinedigm as a play on the digital/3D cin­ema space and an alter­na­tive to larger and more richly-valued stocks like RealD.  At the time, though, the lack of a CEO was a major stum­bling block for many. The com­pany recently announced that film-industry insider Chris McGurk would be tak­ing the CEO role and join­ing for­mer AMC Enter­tain­ment CEO Peter Brown on the Board of Direc­tors.

Chris McGurk

Chris McGurk

Fill­ing this role a bit sooner than we expected is a pos­i­tive devel­op­ment and comes at a time when the momen­tum of dig­i­tal tech­nol­ogy in enter­tain­ment con­tin­ues to build. McGurk has a strong his­tory in the film busi­ness and was most recently run­ning Over­ture films (which Lib­erty Media owned but was not very sup­port­ive of) and before that COO of MGM. We have not yet met him but on the sur­face McGurk brings two things beyond more expe­ri­ence and lead­er­ship.  The first is lots of rela­tion­ships with stu­dio exec­u­tives and tal­ent who are all eager to exploit oppor­tu­ni­ties in dig­i­tal.  The sec­ond is a pas­sion for con­tent pro­duc­tion and inde­pen­dent films.  The lat­ter is impor­tant because if Cinedigm can con­tinue to build on what they’ve started and deliver inno­v­a­tive dig­i­tal and 3D con­tent into their the­ater cus­tomers, it would give their cus­tomers some unique advan­tages over hav­ing “me too” con­tent from the Big Three US the­ater chains.

The deal between McGurk and Cinedigm looks square. First of all, he pur­chased $200K of stock at $1.47/share as part of the agree­ment.  In addi­tion to his com­pen­sa­tion ($600K salary plus $450K “tar­get” bonus) he has been granted options to buy 4.5 mil­lion shares at a weighted aver­age strike price of $2.72.  (The break­down is 1.5m at $1.50, 2.5m at $3.00 and 500K at $5.)  Although we don’t expect to see McGurk with holes in his shoes based on the salary and bonus, in order for him to make “real money” the stock has to get well above $3.  All in all, a fairly shareholder-friendly structure.

So what might detrac­tors of McGurk come up with?  Like many fig­ures in the enter­tain­ment busi­ness, McGurk will evoke a range of knee-jerk reac­tions.  If one wanted to cast stones it could be said that Over­ture didn’t become a great suc­cess and that at MGM McGurk might not have been either the brains or the brawn behind the enter­prise.  We’re a lot less inter­ested in indus­try gos­sip and will be very attuned to what McGurk both says and does in this new role.  He bought some stock com­ing in and has quite a few options struck at 2x the cur­rent stock price.

We’d also note that the interim senior man­age­ment team at Cinedigm has done quite well since long-time CEO and Founder Bud Mayo retired (he was 69 at the time) in June of last year.  Dur­ing the tran­si­tion the team may have been a bit capac­ity con­strained but they didn’t drop the ball on any­thing and McGurk should be able to lever­age the exist­ing team and accel­er­ate the devel­op­ment of the company.

If you missed the prior post it pro­vides more back­ground on the com­pany and val­u­a­tion. The link is above and also in related arti­cles below.

[Dis­clo­sures: Cinedigm is a cor­po­rate research client of Research 2.0 and some Research 2.0 employ­ees may own posi­tions in the stock at the time of this writ­ing (posi­tions that were owned prior to engag­ing with Cinedigm.) Addi­tional infor­ma­tion about our dis­clo­sures and poli­cies can be found on our web­site on the legal page.]

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