UTV New Media has reported a turnover of Rs. 150.13 million, and a loss after tax of Rs. 7.77 million for the full year ending 31st March 2009.
According to the company, the primarily due to its websites, revenues from New Media segment amounted to around Rs. 180 million for the year ended March 31, 2009 and with a loss of Rs. 45 million for the period. Of this revenue, Rs. 173.21 million was from India, while Rs. 7.05 million was from abroad.
According to its 2008-09 annual report released today by the company IT Nation has reported a turnover of Rs. 30.13 million, and a loss after tax of Rs. 56.55 million.
UTV New Media: Content Rights
UTV New Media has a library of almost 15,000 songs, including music rights for movies like Akshay Kumar starrer Singh is King, Jodha Akbar and Rajnikant starrer Tamil movie called Kuselan. They’ve also got digital rights for a Hindi movie called Cheenti Cheenti Bang Bang and Bad Luck Govind, and acquired an independent album from Sonu Nigam called Rafi Resurrected. Regional content includes three Kannada Movies, two Telugu movies and a movie from Haryana, as well as Mittail and Poi Solla Poram which is the Tamil remake of UTV’s Khosla ka Ghosla. The company also acquired acquired digital rights for a 10-12 Tamil language films and a Bengali catalogue. UTV New Media also manages all SMS and IVRS services for UTVi.
For the coming year, UTV intends to strengthen synergies with group businesses for smooth deployment of UTV content over web and mobile, for example, in case of Audio Cinema. The company also intends to launch UTV@play, which it claims “will be the biggest repository of the online legal music content.”
UTV had acquired IT Nation last year, and yesterday, the company announced layoffs. Sources have suggested that around 20 people have been asked to leave so far.
Speaking to MediaNama, Manish Agarwal, CEO of UTV New Media said that “It is a part of an annual review and a consolidation exercise across services. For each brand, teams were captive, and now we will have horizontal teams.”
“We were informed at 5pm yesterday, and asked to leave by 6pm,” one former employee told us on condition of anonymity. Agarwal declined to comment on the number of people that have been asked to leave, but said that no further layoffs are planned at the company.
“All the brands will be revamped,” and contrary to speculation, no IT Nation brand is going to be shut down, Agarwal said. As you can tell from the financial situation of both UTV New Media and IT Nation, the New Media segment has made significant losses for the company.
UTV had acquired IT Nation, the publisher of TechTree, Channeltimes, CXOToday and Enterpriser.in last year. Agarwal joined UTV New Media as CEO recently, taking over from TN Prabhu.
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17 Comments until now.
These are porn links…Knock them off
Layoffs have been taking place at the online extension of UTV since October last year. One of my sources at UTV told me that the due diligence exercise that preceded the acquisition was not thorough. Also only techtree fit into utvi.com's business which otherwise was totally consumer focused. I was also told that the management at utvi.com misread the b2b space and chopped off the events arm of IT Nation which used to make up for almost 50 per cent of IT Nation's revenues earlier. This round of layoffs come as no surprise. They closed enterpriser.in. I wouldn't be surprised if they eventually close the other sites too.
Sanjay, we've been told that the other sites will not be closed.
seems like everything is for change.
tech is getting outsourced.
mobile is getting moved to indiagames.
ITN which was bought last year, now is meeting a slow death.
What is Manish upto ?
Ok, I have a question…on this statement.." Speaking to MediaNama, Manish Agarwal, CEO of UTV New Media said that “It is a part of an annual review and a consolidation exercise across services. For each brand, teams were captive, and now we will have horizontal teams.”
Did Manish do a little bit of homework to understand if there are any systems and processes in place before deciding if the captive brand teams idea was a UNMV concept (by Prabhu) or from ITN? ITN I know always followed horizontal team strategy. There are enough people in the market from ITN to swear by this. So what new strategy is he talking about?
Captive brand teams idea was not good, but anyways who ever had this idea n stradegy they got a lesson , yes ITN has a wonderful system that nobody has in media as such since long they are running their sites , evetns,mailer etc with thier inhouse System very much cost effective ,UTV have never bother to C that n try to implement that., I suggest Mr.Manish Agrawal to first understandt the Existing ITN System.
This z really bad and utv management shd understand ‘how to utilize the resources?’ following this, people wil get scare for working with UTV.
Mismanagement and lack of proper online marketing skills has led to this poor show in results. Why were editorial staff of CXOtoday and Channeltimes asked to leave for some fault made by the sales and top officials. It is time they consolidated by cutting down non-performers in sales and marketing as well.
I think instead of outsourcing, why dont the top management in the organization rely on the people to do the job. I have seen many of my ITNation colleagues worked day n night to get the job completed on behalf of UTVi and UNMV. There were new ideas and the spark to learn new things that is not present with the current employees.
They have axed their own feet
no point of putting the blame on sales, when the website does not perform how do u expect to sell,
Well, this is the "name blame" game again. The Editorial team and sales could have easily come together and discussed. The onus of arranging a meet between editorial and sales is the job of the management, and I guess thats what they get paid for !
The products of ITN is good but not up to market standards, so they are failed in the market…
its no more ITN, dude it is called UNML now, itn ???
U N M L (company in (U) (N) (M) anagable ( L)osses)
UNML , do u think u r in wonderland Mr.chetan.All smart people left UNML.Those people who consistently performed well and sincerly worked for the company were fired.Manish had no idea of what blunder he was doing.Those ppl who are working now are low skilled and highly political .
For eg Testing Team consists of non performers.Only they cling to company.All developers removed are getting good jobs.Wake up.
I think they are looking for people who can do flattery, cheap tricks etc.And about the sales team its the worst dept I have ever seen.
overall UNML bosses and managers are arrogant crooks and best suitable as movie items and side roles (Of course this is a media company) doing stage walk hahaha.
Dude we do not need a product to sell and sell all the time, the product itself should sell sometimes atleast
Dude we do not need a product to sell and sell all the time, the product itself should sell sometimes atleast