With the acquisition of Convergent, we believe we've entered an industry that is extremely well positioned to benefit from dramatic shifts in advertising spend. The overall advertising market in North America is $185 billion annually and the digital advertising segment is accounting for a rapidly growing share of that market. According to a recent report from eMarketer, a leading authority on the digital marketing industry, the digital add segment is projected to grow from approximately 25% of the North American advertising market in 2013 to more than 31% in 2017. Most of this shift in advertising spend comes from the print, radio and directories segments. The digital out of home, DOOH, segment is a relatively small component of the overall digital add market, but this is experiencing strong growth. This segment is projected to go from approximately $4 billion in 2013 to more than $7 billion in 2017 according to PQ Media, a leading research firm focused on the DOOH industry. More specifically, our addressable segment consists of the infrastructure component of the DOOH industry, which includes hardware, software, content management, installation and project management, content creation and NOC services. The infrastructure component is projected to grow from $1.4 billion in 2013 to $2.6 billion in 2017. The DOOH industry is still in its infancy and is highly fragmented, with companies spreading their digital advertising budgets across multiple vendors. As a larger player, we believe Ballantyne has an opportunity to become a clear leader in the industry with unmatched scale and capabilities that can be effectively leveraged to win new client relationships. Since announcing the acquisition, members of the Ballantyne team have spent a great deal of time down in the Atlanta area immersing ourselves in the convergent business, initiating our integration plans and developing our strategies to strengthen its business development capabilities. We continue to be very excited about the potential for this business and the talented group of people that are now part of the company. As we ramp up our sales and marketing efforts, we expect the convergent business to be a strong vehicle for driving profitable growth in the years ahead. In addition to Convergent, we also made a small acquisition to strengthen our cinema screen business. We acquired a business called Peintures Elite, which is a provider of unique screen coatings and paint for high-end screens. We have a longstanding relationship with Peintures Elite and have collaborated with them to design many of our innovative cinema screens. We are seeing strong growth in the cinema screen business with revenue increasing 23% year over year in the third quarter. So it's made a good business sense to secure ownership of the formulations and related coatings used in this business. |