New Delhi: Star India expects to become a one billion dollar entity in terms of operating profit by the end of this decade, 21st Century Fox Co-Chief Operating Officer James Rupert Murdoch has said.
“If we keep innovating and investing in putting more creative and innovative content on screen, Star India will become a billion dollar EBIDTA by the turn of the decade,” Murdoch said. STAR India is a unit of 21st Century Fox.
He was speaking at Asia Pacific Pay-TV Operators Summit, held in Bali between 22nd & 24th April.
Commenting on the company’s India business, Murdoch said it has evolved enormously over the years.
“We love the India business. It has now evolved enormously from Hindi entertainment to regional language broadcasting and now we are a national platform,” he said.
He further said the company is looking at sports business in India as a new pillar for growth in the country.
“The sports business for us is a new pillar and we are looking at the business in a long term time frame,” Murdoch said.
Star India CEO Uday Shankar said sports has a huge role to play in empowerment, especially in a country like India.
“I am prejudiced towards aspirational content and cynical about cynical content. This is something we have always kept in mind while creating all of our content and is the same philosophy that we are bringing to sports as well,” he said.
Sports has a huge role to play in empowerment, especially in a country like India, where there is a need to make the society believe that even an uneducated person can aspire to something greater if he is talented in a sport, he added.
“We have applied the same philosophy that we had in our entertainment business to sports – creating content with deep local affinity using the audience aggregation power that cricket gave,” Shankar said.
