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Is WWE's Bet On Jinder Mahal Paying Off?

This article is more than 6 years old.

On Sunday night Jinder Mahal defeated Shinsuke Nakamura at Hell in a Cell, defending his WWE Championship and making his title reign the longest since Seth Rollins held the belt back in 2015. Yet for many, the victory is no more than just the latest piece of evidence that WWE is using the Indo-Canadian Mahal to drive up its business in India. That leaves one question: Is it working? The available evidence suggests his title run hasn't resulted in any dramatic revenue gains, but also that WWE has little reason to change its plans anytime soon.

Mahal rejoined WWE last year, and he moved to the SmackDown brand this past April as part of the "Superstar Shake-up." Since then he's been pushed as one of WWE's top contenders. He's defeated two huge names in A.J. Styles and Randy Orton, and by beating Nakamura he's now gone over the same guy who just beat John Cena clean a few months ago.

It's an impressive run, and there's little doubt that Mahal's push is largely tied to WWE's plans in India. On March 29th WWE announced that WWEShop, its online store, would launch in India beginning on April 3rd, the same day that WrestleMania 33 would be broadcast in the country. Mahal was a surprise runner-up in the pre-show battle royal at that event, and he even made mainstream news thanks to a run-in with New England Patriots star Rob Gronkowski.

A few weeks later he again surprised wrestling fans by becoming the No. 1 contender for the WWE Championship after winning a six-way match that included the likes of Dolph Ziggler and Sami Zayn. And just two days after that victory, WWE announced the hiring of Sheetesh Srivastava as the vice president and general manager of WWE India. As WWE noted in that announcement: "India represents WWE’s single largest regional contribution to the brand’s massive social media community of 750 million followers globally."

Mahal would go on to defeat Orton for WWE's top title on May 21, shortly before he had new merchandise appear in WWE's online shop, indicating his time in the spotlight wasn't ending anytime soon. And sure enough, this weekend's win over Nakamura was telegraphed last Thursday when WWE put out a press release titled "WWE Live Returns To India With 'The Modern-Day Maharaja' Jinder Mahal." The release announces two December tour dates in New Delhi and even quotes Mahal about the honor of performing in India, suggesting he'll remain in the title scene through at least the end of the year.

So Mahal is pretty clearly the vehicle by which WWE hopes to capitalize on the massive, wrestling-crazy population in India. It's cost the company some negative headlines, as many wrestling fans have apparently been less than thrilled with Mahal's in-ring work, but WWE has often been happy to prioritize its business over the opinions of some wrestling bloggers. The remaining question, then, is whether the bet on Mahal is paying off.

WWE declined to provide country-specific financial data, but we can still lean on the company's SEC filings to get an idea of how it's been performing overseas. They unfortunately don't provide a definitive answer, but a look at WWE Network subscribership and WWEShop revenue indicates that Mahal's run has yet to cause any sort of spike in WWE's international business performance. Yet the company is still performing tremendously well in Asia, suggesting that there's little reason to expect WWE to change tack now.

Perhaps the best indicator of fan interest is WWE Network subscriptions; if Mahal is a must-watch star in India, then you would expect a surge in subscribers once he entered the title picture. Yet the number of international WWE Network subscribers increased from 408,800 to 410,100 over the first three months of Mahal's title reign, good for just a 0.3% increase. It's of course possible that the Indian wrestling market is already quite saturated, but Mahal's rise to WWE champion clearly hasn't sparked any significant new wave of network subscribers in India or elsewhere.

The WWEShop also became available in India right at the start of the company's second fiscal quarter, so if it resulted in a sudden surge of income then that should be noticeable in the numbers. Total WWEShop revenues were $8.4 million that quarter, just a 6% increase over the previous three months. And though that's the highest three-month total WWEShop has ever recorded among the first three quarters - merchandise revenues are typically higher at the end of the year, presumably thanks to holiday shopping - it also marks the WWEShop's slowest year-over-year revenue increase (12% from Q2 2016) since 2013. So probably no flood of Indian money there, either.

It seems pretty clear, then, that Mahal isn't exactly changing the game as WWE champ. But, as a WWE spokesperson noted to Forbes, WWE's plans for India are much more longterm in nature: "India is WWE’s top market in the world for TV consumption, #1 for Facebook followers and #2 for YouTube viewership, so it’s logical to believe that as the middle class grows and mobile usage explodes, so will the monetization of our brand."

And with the big picture in mind, it's worth considering that WWE generated $15.5 million from Asia between April and June, good for the third-highest quarterly total the company has ever posted in the region. That regional success obviously can't be attributed directly to Mahal or even India - WWE has also been making inroads into China lately - but it does a pretty great job of illustrating the company's success in growing internationally. And with that sort of track record, there's no reason to expect WWE to change its strategy anytime soon.