Cineworld, the UK's second largest cinema chain, will signal it plans to launch an initial public offering, becoming the latest private equity-backed business attempting to join the London Stock Exchange.

Cineworld (previously Cine UK) made it really big by buying France UGC's theatres in the UK last year. This was in fact bad news for me as I was then using my French UGC “unlimited” movie card to go to London “UGCs”, something I could not do during my last month before I came back to Paris for the summer break.

I had the opportunity to meet Cineworld CEO Steve Wiener when he came as guest speaker during the “Managing Entertainment & Experience” class I took in the Fall term. He is really a great and nice guy and the story of how he created Cine UK was captivating and covered many interesting topics of which were the unlimited card (which he thought was rubbish but had to continue after buying UGC), founding & funding (this came out of a consulting job and he was living on a shoe string while waiting for banks to sign the draft) and marketing & logo design (the least of his worries as both logo & name had to change a few times).

Needless to say that I will subscribe to a Cineworld unlimited card for my next 6 months in UK (more on that in a coming big news that I should have posted weeks ago…)