The return of movie-goers this year is welcome news for CEO Alex Younger
By J.P. Faber
It was an odd coupling, “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer,” but anyone who follows the movie industry knows that “Barbenheimer” – the cultural phenomenon of people watching both blockbusters – signaled a kind of post-pandemic sea change. “Barbie” topped more than $1.38 billion worldwide by the end of August, making it the Warner Bros. top-grossing film of all time, while “Oppenheimer” crossed $850 million globally.
More than the money, however, these twin titans signaled the return to movies by the public, after several dismal years during which the COVID virus decimated cinemas. “We got completely blindsided by COVID, as did any industry with fixed seating,” says Alex Younger, the CEO of Miami-based CES, which has been installing and servicing cinemas in Latin America for more than 30 years, primarily in Brazil, Colombia, and Ecuador. “Now, movies are being released again on the big screen, and cinemas are ramping up.”
That is good news for Younger, whose firm has built more than 100 cinema complexes in Latin America, with about 1,000 screens. “We build and service movie theaters, that’s our business,” says Younger. “We just did one in Ecuador. But I don’t know of many other industries that have gotten affected as much by COVID as did the cinema.” Whereas CES was installing five to 10 new cinemas a year before the pandemic, they downsized to just four or five projects a year.
“Next year, we will get back to those pre-COVID numbers,” says Younger. “For now, we are still servicing those 1,000 screens [that CES built].” The company also focused more on the U.S. market during the pandemic – having already installed the CMX Cinemas in Brickell City Centre – and got into the AV business.
CES was founded by Younger’s father Guillermo, a Hungarian Jew who immigrated to Honduras. He settled in a small town where he started to buy properties. “He needed a cinema for the town, so he started his own,” says Younger of his dad, who learned enough in the process to begin selling movie equipment. As the business expanded, Guillermo moved first to Panama and then to Miami in 1982, where Alex was born a year later.
From Miami, the company began installing complete cinemas across the Americas, starting in Honduras, El Salvador, and Nicaragua, then expanding to Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Brazil, Chile, Argentina, and Venezuela. Younger grew up working for CES as a technician, installing equipment – including the digital projectors that began replacing film projectors a dozen years ago. “I installed about 500 projectors and then said that I wanted to get out,” he says. “I wanted to be in sales.” Having been raised in the U.S., Younger then expanded the company’s focus to the domestic market. “I asked my dad, ‘Why don’t we do this in the U.S.?’ He said, ‘Ok, try it.’ So we did, and within a year we had the fifth-largest circuit [of theater clients] in the U.S.”
Currently, CES has eight employees in Miami, with another 18 in Latin America. Younger says that while LatAm cinemas are coming back, some markets are doing better than others. Colombia is still below pre-COVID numbers for cinema attendance, while Peru is up 120 percent from then. In the meantime, the company is leveraging its expertise to expand in the U.S. Having built capacity with its own maintenance call center and the software needed to maintain the digital projectors in LatAm, it’s now negotiating with the big movie chains, like Regal, Cinemark, and Cineplex, to service and update their equipment.
But with a writer’s strike threatening to slow down the stream of new film releases, Younger is hedging his bets by further expanding into the audio-visual market. With the cinema side of the company dubbed CES Plus, there is now CES AV, “getting into the audio-visual space here in Miami, with TV, sound, outdoor lighting – basically making smart homes,” says Younger. “This is a business we will focus on here in the future…. I want to leverage the same technical expertise.”
