Another US studio to be bought by China firm

A CHINESE copper producer will buy a majority stake of US filmmaker Voltage Pictures, the producer of The Hurt Locker, for $349 million, it said, the latest in a string of Chinese acquisitions of Hollywood assets.

Anhui Xinke New Materials Company offered to buy 80 percent of Midnight Investments – which owns Voltage Pictures – for 2.39 billion yuan ($348.9 million) in an all-cash transaction, the Chinese firm said on Monday in a statement.

Among its best-known films, Los Angeles-based Voltage Pictures produced the 2009 war film The Hurt Locker and the Oscar-winning 2013 feature Dallas Buyers Club.

Shanghai-listed Anhui Xinke, known for producing copper cables and wires, said in its third-quarter report that it had been losing money for the past nine months. It had a net loss of 79.8 million yuan from January through September, its earnings report showed, compared with a 98.2 million yuan loss in the same period last year.

This is not the first move the Chinese copper maker has tried to branch into entertainment.

It bought a Chinese television production firm called Xi’an Mengzhou Film and TV Culture Communication last year.

The purchase of a Hollywood production company could “enhance the listed company’s overall profitability”, the firm said in the statement.