Dish TV plans to continue with Videocon D2H brand

NEW DELHI: Jawahar Goel-led Dish TV has no immediate plans to kill the Videocon brand in the DTH business and the two brands will continue to compete aggressively. This will happen at a time when Dish TV works out synergies — as well as manpower rationalisation — after the acquisition of Videocon D2H last year.

Expand

Anil Dua, Group CEO of Dish TV, said the Videocon D2H brand will be continued “in the foreseeable future” as it enjoys substantial goodwill.

“Both brands will continue to exist for at least next one-to-two years, following which we will make an evaluation. While Dish TV is particularly strong in the eastern region, Videocon D2H has a good hold in south India,” Dua told TOI here. The merger, announced in October last year, was completed in late March, and the parent Dish TV has now started work on operational and business synergies. “They will certainly compete for customers at the front-end, but there will be a strategic alliance at the back-end.”

Synergies will be worked at in areas such as content, debt-servicing, call centres and disaster recovery set-up. The two companies — which will have a combined revenue of Rs 6,000 crore — directly employ around 2,500 people and have support of 25,000 offrolls staff. “We have reduced on-rolls staff by around 200 as we merge, especially in areas where there was duplication of manpower. Another couple of hundreds may happen over time.”

Expand

The company sees the benefits from the synergy at over Rs 500 crore.

The merger has created the largest DTH company in India, which is estimated to have a combined market share of around 45% with around 29 million subscribers. Closest rival Tata Sky has around 26% share, Airtel DTH around 21%, Sun DTH around 5%, while the rest is scattered between smaller players.

The DTH market is currently estimated to have over 60 million subscribers and is growing at around 10% annually. However, it faces stiff competition from new entrants such as Reliance Jio and independent streaming companies like Netflix, Hotstar and Amazon Prime.

DTH companies have been consolidating businesses, while looking at fresh investments to counter challengers. In December last year, Bharti Airtel sold 20% stake in its DTH business to an affiliate of private equity player Warburg Pincus for Rs 2,300 crore, raising cash to tackle competitors.

Dua said Dish TV will invest over Rs 1,500 crore by September towards the business operations of the two DTH brands.