Armed with funding from Adani Media Ventures, Quintillion Business Media (QBM) will evaluate the feasibility of launching a business news channel in due course, CEO Anil Uniyal has said. QBM is an indirect subsidiary of Raghav Bahl’s Quint Digital Media.
“I can’t yes or no about a business news channel launch. It’s too early to talk about any of that. We will evaluate in due course,” Anil Uniyal told exchange4media.
In back-to-back announcements, Quint Digital on Tuesday announced that Adani Group will acquire a minority stake in Quintillion Business Media, which owns and operates digital business news brand Bloomberg Quint (BQ). The deal excludes other Quint Digital Media properties like The Quint, The News Minute, and Youth Ki Awaaz.
The investment by Adani marks its entry into the Indian media industry. The Ahmedabad-based conglomerate’s foray in media is being spearheaded by Sanjay Pugalia as CEO and Editor-in-Chief of its media initiatives. Incidentally, Pugalia was earlier the President and Editorial Director at Quint Digital Media.
Before this announcement, Quint Digital had revealed that its 74:26 equity joint venture (JV) with Bloomberg has ended. While bloombergquint.com will get rebranded, the platform will continue to distribute Bloomberg content in India through a content licencing agreement.
Quintillion Media and Bloomberg Media had formed a JV in 2016 to launch a new business channel (BloombergQuint), localised website (bloombergquint.com), and live events business. While the JV launched an India-focussed website, it had failed to launch the English business news channel BloombergQuint since it couldn’t get permission from the ministry of information and broadcasting (MIB).
Commenting on the deal with Adani, Uniyal noted that the company will firm up its future expansion plans once the deal with Adani culminates. “Once the transaction is complete, we will firm up our future plans. Over the next few weeks, we will firm up our plans of strengthening and scaling up BQ,” he stated.
While BQ will sport a new brand identity by dropping Bloomberg’s name from the logo, the platform’s content strategy will remain unchanged. “We will tweak the current branding since the JV with Bloomberg is over. We continue to have a content licencing arrangement with them. The website will only see a tweak on logo/branding. The look, feel, content-wise, editorial all will remain the same,” Uniyal said.
The QBM CEO also said that the capital infusion by the Adani Group will help it to scale up its content and product offering. “We are delighted to have Adani Group as an investor. With the Adani group on board, we will scale up our content and product offering. The capital infusion will go into expanding content offering and technology deployment,” he noted.
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