December 18, 2007
More bad financial news for Photo-Me is not necessarily noteworthy, but the field day the UK press are having with headlines is somewhat amusing.
While the Independent goes with the mundane “Photo-Me stock dives 8 per cent after warning it will go into the red,” In the News and the BBC match “picture” puns with “Sorry picture for Photo-Me” and “Bleak picture for Photo-Me sales.”
My favorite, however technologically inaccurate, is from This is Money, who declare that “Photo-Me investors get the negatives.” Nice.
The £240m sale was a fantasy, the current capitalized value as of 11th Jan 2008 is just over £100m,expect any time soon a market value of £50m.
Expect another 20,000 minilabs to close in the world this year as the market is shifting to on-demand kiosk printing, in USA its now over 14% of all retail photo printing rising some 500% over last few years.
Photo-Me has slow time warp kiosk in this space, so expect it to miss this market, let alone the factor it has no branding that relates to the next generation market.