BUSINESS EXPANSION

Taranaki Daily News, 8 March 1935, Page 9

BUSINESS EXPANSION

AMALGAMATED THEATRES SOME HISTORY OF THE FIRM. With the official opening of the State Theatre to-day the banner of Amalgamated Theatres (New Zealand) Ltd. will have been unfurled for the sixty-sec-ond time in the relatively short history of the company. A survey of the facts surrounding the birth, progressive growth and meteoric rise—from obscurity to a foremost place in the cinema world in New Zealand—of the company reveals a phenomenally rapid and successful development. Chronologically speaking the company is yet in its infancy.. It is only 15 years old, but its consolidation in recent years is certainly an achievement of which any organisation might be proud. To-day Amalgamated Theatres, Ltd., control and direct 62 theatres in various parts of the Dominion. Only 15 years ago the company began its career by the acquisition of an unpretentious theatre—then known as the Hippodrome—in the heart of Queen Street, Auckland. In the early years of its operations it made slow, steady progress, but its sudden expansion in the last three years has been a source of amazement to everyone through the Dominion. Early in' 1930, only 10 years after its formation, the company controlled about 28 theatres and from then onwards the directors decided that in order to assure themselves of good film supplies it would be necessary to reorganise the whole circuit to have one or more representative theatres in each key centre. To-day they control a chain situated in towns as far north as Whangarei and as far south as Invercargill. Included in this group is the famous Civic theatre at Auckland with its magnificent architectural beauty and illuminated silhouette. Amalgamated Theatres (New Zealand) Ltd. is purely a New Zealand organisation, operated wholly by New Zealand capital and staffed by New Zealanders. The dynamic force behind the company and the man who presides over

its destinies is the comparatively young governing director, Mr. M. J, Moodabe, who, with uncanny vision and tenacity of purpose against almost insuperable difficulties, has piloted it to remarkable success. His younger brother, Mr. J. P. Moodabe, controls with tireless energy the administrative and business departments.

The two progressive brothers were bom, reared and educated at Auckland. In all their enterprises and undertakings they have been inseparably associated, and by following a rigid policy of providing the picture-going public with good, clean and wholesome films and by the application of scrupulously honest methods, they have undoubtedly reared one of the greatest businesses of its kind in Australasia. They are firm believers in the doctrine of spending money obtained from the public in such a way that it will benefit those from whom it came in the first place.