Auckland software company Vista Group has had one of its strongest weeks in years, signing both of Mexico’s two largest cinema chains and one of Britain’s biggest exhibitors to its cloud platform and locking some of the world’s busiest box offices onto technology built in New Zealand.
The largest of the deals is a six-year agreement with Cinépolis, the biggest cinema operator in Mexico and one of the largest in the world by ticket sales. Under the deal Cinépolis will move its entire Mexican circuit of 504 sites and more than 4,100 screens onto Vista Cloud Operational Excellence, the most advanced tier of Vista’s cloud software. Commercial terms began on 1 January 2026 and the transition is expected to take place across the rest of the year. BusinessDesk reported that the agreement builds on Cinépolis already shifting its Spanish chain, Cine Yelmo, onto Vista Cloud over 2024 and 2025.
Days earlier Vista had announced a five-year agreement with Cinemex, Mexico’s second-largest chain, covering 289 sites and more than 2,800 screens across more than 100 Mexican cities, along with 23 sites and over 300 screens that Cinemex runs in the United States. That deal starts with Vista’s on-premises software and its Data Empowerment cloud tool, with regular reviews built in to move Cinemex onto the full Operational Excellence platform over the term. Together the two agreements mean both of Mexico’s dominant cinema groups will run on New Zealand software.
In the United Kingdom, Vista signed Cineworld to its Vista Cloud Digital Enablement platform across 88 sites and more than 950 screens, with the rollout due during 2026. Cineworld is part of the wider Regal Cineworld group, which also runs hundreds of Regal cinemas in the United States and dozens more across Eastern Europe and Israel, so the British deal could open the door to far larger business. It follows Vista moving 25 Picturehouse cinemas onto the same platform in 2025.
Vista Group chief executive Stuart Dickinson said the run of deals showed the company’s cloud products were winning over the industry’s biggest names. He said the agreements demonstrated the market fit of the company’s Operational Excellence capability for the largest and most innovative exhibitors globally, and pointed to its growing momentum with major cinema chains.
The wins matter because of how Vista makes its money. For most of its history the company sold one-off software licences to cinemas and then charged for support and upgrades. Over the past few years it has been pushing customers onto Vista Cloud, where they pay an ongoing subscription instead. That shift is painful in the short term, because upfront licence fees disappear, but it builds the kind of steady, repeating revenue that investors prize.
The numbers suggest the strategy is starting to pay off. Vista returned to profit in 2025 and reported record revenue, with annual recurring revenue reaching 163 million dollars at the end of the year, up 12 percent. The company has told the market it expects recurring revenue to climb past 175 million dollars in 2026, and Dickinson has said demand for Vista Cloud is now running ahead of the company’s ability to deliver it, with about 35 percent of its enterprise customer sites already live on the platform. Vista has also set a longer-term ambition of 315 million dollars in recurring revenue once its new embedded payments business is fully built out and its customers are entirely on the platform.
Vista Group is headquartered in Auckland and listed on both the New Zealand and Australian stock exchanges under the code VGL. Its software sits behind the ticket counter and the screen schedule at thousands of cinemas around the world, handling everything from seat bookings and loyalty programmes to the timing of trailers and the data cinemas use to decide which films to keep. Few moviegoers would know the name, but a large share of the world’s cinema admissions are processed on systems written in New Zealand.
For the local technology sector the deals are a reminder that a homegrown company can win and hold enterprise customers at the very top of a global industry. New Zealand exporters often struggle to scale beyond a handful of markets, yet Vista has spent two decades building a position that now spans North America, Europe, Asia and Latin America. Signing the two biggest chains in a single large market within days of each other is the sort of result that is hard to dislodge once the software is embedded in a cinema’s daily operations.
The agreements also point to a wider trend in the cinema business, where chains battered by the pandemic and the rise of streaming are looking for cheaper and more flexible ways to run their operations. Moving to the cloud lets exhibitors cut the cost of maintaining their own servers and gives them better data on what audiences actually want to watch. For Vista, every chain that makes that move turns a one-off customer into a long-term subscriber.
What do you think of New Zealand technology companies competing on the world stage? Have you noticed better booking or loyalty systems at your local cinema? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
Leave a Reply