Mukta Arts Acquires 51% Stake In Coruscant Tec; Option To Buy 49% More

Mukta Arts, a BSE listed Media and Entertaiment co founded by filmmaker Subhash Ghai has picked up a 51 percent stake in Coruscant Tec, a mobile VAS co founded by Ajay Adiseshann and Probir Roy in 2003. The two Coruscant promoters have also founded mobile payment company Paymate, which has received funding from KPCB and Sherpalo Ventures. According to the BSE filing by Mukta Arts,

The Company (Coruscant) is undercapitalized and was seeking investors who could create and aggregate content which is the key to this business. For Mukta Arts which has access to short content created by Whilstling Woods students and Audio and Film content, Coruscant was a good platform. Mukta has the option of acquiring the balance 49%.

It’s an all cash deal, and there are targets that Coruscant will have to meet, Probir Roy, co-founder of Coruscant told MediaNama. “It is in our interest to grow the customer base and the revenues”. Coruscant currently has only India specific licenses, but their mandate will now be to leverage Mukta Arts content, particularly in international markets, where “prices are more favourable.” Roy declined to detail any international expansion plans. Coruscant has around 13-14 agreements in place. They’ve provided Java based games to Indiatimes, images to Soundbuzz, developed the mobile versions of Man’s World Magazine, MF Husains paintings, and Uncle Pai’s comics (from Lalit Media).

More on the state of the company and our take on the deal:

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RealAcres To Receive $4.4 Million Investment From iProperty; To Raise Funding By End Of FY09

This just in: iProperty will invest around $4.4 Million (Rs. 18.8 cr / AUD$5 million) in RealAcres.com. Murli Ramakrishnan, COO of RealAcres told MediaNama that Horizon Infoventures, the parent company of RealAcres, will raise another round of funding by the end of the financial year 2008-09.

The $470,000 investment that we had reported from the AUX filing is meant for the initial setup over six months - to be used for setting up office in Bangalore and Pune, and moving to a larger office in Mumbai. The next tranches of money will come in thereafter, over a period of 3 years. RealAcres has a team of 22 people in Mumbai, which they will expand to 50-55 over three months. They’ll also be hiring 10 people each for Bangalore and Pune. RealAcres began with exhibitions for real estate companies and builders, and now they intend to launch the iProperty Expo in India.

RealAcres will be revamped, and they’re considering rebranding. Interestingly, the site was launched in September 2005, a week after Info Edge’s real estate portal 99acres went live. We’d reported on RealAcres being acquired by the Australian Stock Exchange listed online real estate IPGA (iProperty) company a few days ago.

iProperty Group Enters India By Acquiring RealAcres.com; To Invest Almost $500,000 In Working Capital

The IPGA Group (iProperty), a company listed on the Australian Stock Exchange (ASX), has entered the Indian market by acquiring Horizon Infoventures, which owns the Indian property portal RealAcres. The acquisition has been made through its wholly owned subsidiary iProperty Group Asia Pte Ltd. iProperty will introduce print, exhibition and online luxury products to the Indian market. They had acquired an events company in March this year (see below for acquisitions).

The terms of the deal: iProperty will invest A$ 0.53 Million (around $470,000) in 4 tranches for 43 percent shares, and swap shares for 17 percent. They will have the option to acquire the remaining 40 percent based on future earnings. The management of RealAcres have a lock-in for a minimum of 3 years.

The deal appears similar to iProperty’s July 2008 acquisition of VRHouse.com.tw in Taiwan. RealAcres claims that it has around 211,000 property listings. The company is based in Mumbai, and focuses primarily on the Western India market. Do note that often real estate agents are offered free listings to get them to sign up for property sites, so the number of listings may not be an indication of paid listings, hence revenue.

Significant players in the online property space in India include MagicBricks (Times Business), 99Acres (Info Edge), Indiaproperty (Consim) and Makaan.com. HT Media and Manorama Online are also planning real estate portals.

RealAcres is just one of the acquisitions that the iProperty group has made since listing on the ASX. More on the iProperty Group and its acquisitions: (more…)

Q1-09 Results: Tata Communications Revenues Up 4%, Profits Down 20%; Cisco-Telepresence Deal; Neotel Acquisition; No Details - WiFi, Broadband, Subs

View: Earnings release | Financials

Tata Communications has reported a fairly small rise in revenues - of only 4 percent, year on year, at Rs. 921 crore, up from Rs. 888 crore for the same quarter last year. They’ve reported a net profit of Rs. 98.3 crore, down 20% from Rs. 123.6 crore for the same quarter last year.

During the quarter:
– Acquisition of South African Telco Neotel: Alongwith Tata Africa, Tata Communications announced an acquisition of 56 percent - a majority stake - in Neotel, a fixed line telecom operator in South Africa. Tata Communications acquired 30 percent of this stake from Eskom and Transnet. The transaction is subject to conditions, and has not been closed yet.
– Launch of Telepresence services with Cisco: The first phase of public rooms are in the Taj Hotels and major business centres in Mumbai, Bangalore, New York, Boston and London; also in CII offices in Delhi, Chennai, Bangalore and Hyderabad. The cost of the service is not mentioned. Telepresence rooms offer life-like, high definition conferencing facilities with audio, video and environmental qualities that provide an alternative to face-to-face meetings. Here’s a video demo of Telepresense (Ed: definitely worth a look)

Update: here’s a chart with Internet and Broadband subscriber growth, and Broadband ARPU, from Tata Communications’ Investor presentation -

Numbers from last quarter: The company has only around 500 WiFi hotspots, and claims to be India’s leading WiFi hotspot provider; frankly, that’s a sad state of affairs for WiFi deployment.

UTV Gaming Revenues At $3.45 M; Plans $75 M Gaming Investments; Fund US Startup, Acquire Mobile Games Aggregator

It looks like BSE listed UTV Software is planning to add Online Gaming to its existing portfolio of console and mobile gaming companies.  UTVs board has “taken on record” proposals regarding $75 million in investments in three key initiatives in the Gaming space:

• Investment in a prominent US based startup in the Online Gaming space
• The acquisition of a US based mobile games aggregator (Ed: Will complement Indiagames)
  
• Ignition: Increasing its stake in Ignition entertainment from 70 percent to 95 percent by buying out an existing investor. We had written about this earlier. Also planned is an increase investment in Ignition for its three console games being developed in London, Florida and Tokyo.

Download UTVs financial results here.

UTV has been restructuring its business over the past year, so the earnings results for this quarter aren’t really comparable with any of the previous ones: last year, their financials incorporated numbers from Indiagames, and UTV had also sold off their post-production business; during Q1 2008-09, UTV completed the acquisition of IT Nation, and added a New Media segment, which also includes UTV New Media Ltd. Animation has now been shifted from the Interactive segment to the Films segment. Like I said - it’s difficult to judge the growth of the company, and compare Q1 2008-09 results with previous quarters. So just the numbers, and some pointers:

Gaming/Interactive
UTVs Interactive business, which now comprises only of IndiaGames and Ignition Entertainment reported revenues of Rs. 14.559 crores for the quarter ending June 30th 2008. However, the segment reported an EBITDA loss of Rs. 3.57 crores, and a significant amount of investment - Rs. 133.79 crores. A spokesperson told us that the gaming segment should be looked at on an annual basis, since the product cycle tends to be long (particularly for Ignition, which is developing console games).

New Media
UTVs New Media segment, which includes UTV New Media Ltd (UNML) and ITNation, reported a loss of Rs. 63.8 lakhs at the EBITDA level, and revenues of Rs. 2.6 crores. Remember that UTV completed the acquisition of 76.5 percent equity in IT Nation Media Pvt Ltd in May. We noted that UTV has invested just Rs. 12.16 crores in the New Media segment, while they are reported to have paid almost Rs. 15 crores for acquiring ITNation. A company spokesperson told us that the pay-out hasn’t been completed yet, and this will be reflected in future quarters as well.

Note that the company had earlier announced an overall digital spend of Rs. 120 crores over the next two years. Now if only we knew what all they meant by digital.

Music
No comments yet on music, but UTV has told us that Music will be part of the Films segment in the financials. However, there was one significant development in the music space in the quarter - UTV went ahead and sold music rights for 14 of its films to T-Series, even though UTV has its own label UTV Music, and they are buying music rights from other content owners. Strange.

The End Of CyberMedia Careers: Resume Database Acquired By TimesJobs

A surprising development, albeit sad: BSE listed CyberMedia has shut down its jobs portal CyberMedia Careers, reports Alootechie; the complete candidate database has been acquired by Timesjobs, a portal from BCCL owned Times Business Solutions.

Sure enough, the domain where once CyberMedia Dice was hosted, now features a Timesjobs logo, and here’s a note which verifies the transfer. User resumes have been shifted to TimesJobs.

Grounded By The IT Crunch Or Just Didn’t Take Off?
Has there been a declining demand from the IT sector for jobs? For the past few quarters, we’ve been hearing analysts consistently question Info Edge (Naukri) about the impact of the slowdown in the IT sector (particularly due to exchange rate issues) on the job classifieds business. At the same time, while Naukri’s dependency on IT for revenues has been slowly declining - 31% (Q2-08), 30% (Q3-08), 27% (Q1-09) - though overall IT revenues have been growing. So, frankly, going by the only publicly disclosed numbers in this space, there doesn’t appear to have been much of an impact of a slowdown in the IT space.

Perhaps there has been a greater impact on other job portals, or more of an impact on a vertical specific portal like CyberMedia Dice. The other possibility is that CyberMedia Dice simply did not take off - they reported significant losses in 2006-07, and had a registered database of only around 680,000 job-seekers after over 3 years in operation, compared to Info Edge, which has disclosed over 12 million registered users for Naukri.com.

We’ve contacted CyberMedia for more details.

The CyberMedia Dice Timeline
September 2004: CyberMedia, a specialty media company with a significant focus on technology, ties up with Dice, the largest portal in the world for technology professionals. CyberMedia plans to launch a jobs portal.
June 2005: CyberMedia lists on the BSE
July 2005: PE firms General Atlantic Partners and Quadrangle Group acquire Dice
August 2005: CyberMedia Dice is Launched
October 2006 CyberMedia Dice reports operating losses Rs. 1.40 crores for the first 2 quarters of 2006-07
May 2007: Cybermedia restructuring: E Abraham Matthew to head online properties and Cybermedia Dice
Feb 2008: Dice sells stake in CyberMedia Dice to Pradeep Gupta, founder of CyberMedia. Portal renamed Cybermedia Careers. Reported numbers - over 680,000 registered IT job-seekers.
July 2008: TimesJobs acquires the Resume Database of CyberMedia Careers.

Readers will recall that HP owned Snapfish also recently acquired the database of Merasnap.com

Updated: Expedia Acquires India OTA TravelGuru: Report; TravelGuru Denies

TravelGuru CEO Ashwin Damera’s response to Medianama.com regarding the story about the company being acquired by Expedia:

Dear Nikhil,
I’m disappointed that mere speculation is being published in the form of a “story”. Many people have called me based on this hearsay and what they have read online.

There are many inaccuracies in these reports – the biggest being – there has been no deal signed!

What more is there to deny?

Warm regards,

Ashwin

Translation: The valuations reported were completely out of whack. No deal has been signed yet, but that doesn’t mean one will not be. It will be difficult for me to deny anything else on the record, so this is all I have to say.

Original Story: Online travel portal TravelGuru has sold a majority stake to Expedia, the largest OTA in the world, reports VCCircle. We had also heard that TravelGuru had been acquired, but weren’t able to confirm this last week. BCCL also had a Private Treaties investment in TravelGuru, and I’d asked Private Treaties CEO S. Sivakumar about the TravelGuru being bought by Expedia last week, but he offered no comment. As per the report, the majority stake has been acquired for $17 million, at a valuation of $30 million for the combination of TravelGuru and Desiya.com.

Something about these numbers doesn’t seem to be correct. If you go by earlier news reports, TravelGuru had acquired hotel aggregator Desiya for $25 million. So either the Desiya acquisition was overstated by a significant margin, or the $30 million combined valuation for TravelGuru and Desiya is understated. Either way, this doesn’t seem to be a good sign for the OTA business, which has attracted significant VC Funding.

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