‘TV9 Network’s journey is about complete disruption’

livemint.com:

Mint, he spoke about the three pillars—content, distribution and marketing—which helped to go from a net loss of ₹55 crore in FY20 to a net profit of ₹76 crore in FY23. Edited excerpts… Hindi news channel TV9 Bharatvarsha was launched in March and I joined in August of that year. Because of the launch-related expenses, we had an Ebitda loss of ₹44 crore and a net loss of ₹55 crore in FY20.

But since then, if you look year on year, our topline grew 40% in FY21, 50% in FY22 and 16% in FY23. While almost everybody in the news industry grew in FY22, because they were growing on the covid slump, for us, it was different because we grew on a 40% growth over the previous year. FY23, if you check the listed players, have either remained stagnant or have seen a drop.

Now coming to the bottom line, I started at a net loss of ₹55 crore in FY20, the next year FY21 we broke even, FY22 we had a PAT of about ₹50 crore and in FY23, we ended with a PAT of ₹76 crore. Again, if you compare with the listed news companies, they have witnessed a significant drop, ranging from 30% to 70%. So this is the journey, now you need to decide whether you call it a complete turnaround or you call it a disruption.

Last year, we closed at about ₹635 crore, and this year, we will be closing anything between ₹750 crore and ₹800 crore, because this will also be an election year. Last year we emerged amongst the top three, I would tend to think that other than News18 and India Today, the rest of the news networks were lower than us. Though the other companies, that might be close to us are unlisted.