CSA, owned by ITV, has secured a long-term contract with the Cineworld Group, Britain’s second-largest cinema chain, which has 783 screens. The move is expected to bolster CSA’s appeal to potential buyers of the £80 million division.

CSA said that it had beaten Pearl & Dean to a five-year contract with Cineworld, which accounts for about a quarter of all cinemas in the UK through the Cineworld and UGC chains.

The division is the most valuable of several non-core British assets that ITV has put up for sale, with others including minority stakes in Arsenal and Liverpool football clubs, collectively worth an estimated £18 million, Granada Learning and a one-third share of MUTV, Manchester United’s cable television channel. The defeat is a blow to Pearl & Dean, part of SMG, which will lose the UGC account and see its share of the £160 million screen advertising market shrink to about 20 per cent, with Vue its largest remaining client.

It is understood that Pearl & Dean was defeated after it emerged that CSA was willing to underwrite as much as £100 million of advertising for Cineworld. Cineworld is owned by Blackstone, the private equity group, which bought Cine-UK and UGC late last year.

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