M+E Connections

Now that the spin-off of Technicolor Creative Studios and the VANTIVA re-brand are in the rearview mirror, VANTIVA’s plans includes diversification into new categories, including vinyl records, according to Luis Martinez-Amago, VANTIVA CEO.

“We decided last year to launch a diversification path,” he said during a recent interview. For example, he noted that the company had dipped its toes in the Internet of Things (IoT) waters and has now expanded into IoT for verticals.

IoT for the home is something that the company had already been doing “through our partners, through our service providers,” including Comcast in the U.S., he noted.

“We have products to provide platforms for them to commercialise … IoT security and we believe that the industry [and] the people that have what we call operational premises have a need of an IoT platform in the premises to collect and treat the information before sending it to the cloud,” he explained.

Applications for the IoT technology could be in a restaurant, retail store, factory or warehouse, he noted. “These companies need to measure what is happening – things like movement or temperature” and there are sensors that measure those details, he said.

“But you need to gather all this with a quite high quality type of product to make sure that you don’t lose any information,” he pointed out. “So we have engaged in what I call an exploration process over the last 18 months to make sure that the technology we have from our experience [with] the service providers can be used on this type of ecosystem. And through the trials that we have run with a number of customers, we are ticking all the boxes.”

Getting Behind Vinyl

The historical DVD/optical disc production and distribution business is a sector that “we are the leader [in] by far,” Martinez-Amago said.

But he said: “This is a market in a certain slow decline, even if studios believe that they will stay forever because there is a public that will keep buying DVDs forever for a number of reasons.”

What VANTIVA is doing, therefore, is first to try and maintain optical disc sales and “keep delivering the same returns, even if the volumes are slightly going down,” he explained.

But, as part of the firm’s diversification efforts,” VANTIVA is also diversifying its production and fulfilment capacities, he said.

For example, “we are starting to work on vinyl, which is a growing market,” he said. Vinyl record sales have picked up significantly in recent years as CD sales have significantly declined. All the forecasts are pointing to vinyl growth continuing “over the foreseeable future,” according to Martinez-Amago.

“We started to produce vinyl this year already, and we have more than a million already produced,” he disclosed, adding: “We are putting in place a fulfilment centre in Nashville, Tennessee, that we are going to be not only creating all the fulfilment [for] but also mixing this with other articles that the studios put around the record,” he said.

He called vinyl a “very interesting business,” adding his company also has “huge fulfilment sites in Memphis.”

And “a bit more [into the] future, VANTIVA is also now working in the microfluidics segment, he said, noting it uses some of the same technology used for DVDs. With the same type of plastic and precision, “we can create a test platform” to analyse body fluids and introduce a machine that can read the different components of the body fluid, he said.

“We have been researching with the pharma companies” in recent years, he said, noting: “We are [creating]  the proof of concept that they are investing [in] and they plan to launch this in the coming future.”

He added: “As soon as this market start growing, we are in the perfect position to capture this growth.”