Monday, September 03, 2012

“AT THIS POINT, GEC BUSINESS IS GOING TO COME DOWN”

UTV’s Global Broadcasting division posted a remarkable turnaround in the last year. CEO M. K. Anand speaks to B&E on the favouring factors and future expansion

M. K. Anand, CEO, UTV Global Broadcasting, remarkably left another media behemoth, nee paper tiger, the Times group, to join the UTV group. B&E gets into conversation with the man who has taken UTV’s Broadcasting arm to the market with popular channels like UTV Bindass, UTV Action, UTV Movies Bloomberg UTV and UTV World Movies and finds out how he is set to take them further:

B&E: UTV Global Broadcasting is on an upward trajectory and growing faster than ever. What is the synergy driving the division?
M. K. Anand (MK):
The only synergy from the corporation point of view is the brand name ‘UTV’. With the experience that Ronnie brings to the table coupled with his understanding of the Indian entertainment consumer, the trajectory has generally been up for the last 5 years in the B2C space. From a macro economic point of view, the market has taken a dip and again rebounded. What worked for us were the investment decisions that Ronnie took when other companies were cutting down. So this company decided that recession was over 6 months before the rest of the companies of our country did. That’s how we got a head-start. The growth in GRP (Gross Rating Points), which happened over the existing period was far earlier than when the recession actually got over because investment into content and distribution happened when other people were cutting down.