ALTBalaji aims to break-even in the next 3 years

Balaji Telefilms' video on demand platform ALTBalaji plans to invest up to Rs 150 crore a year for the next two-three years, while looking to achieve breakeven in the next three years.

The digital platform was launched in April last year and ended the year with over 1.2 million paid subscriptions with 800 million minutes of content watched, with an average watch time of 120 minutes per user, it said.

Besides India, the digital platform has acquired customers in over 90 countries and has over 13 million users.

"We expect to maintain our cash spends on ALTBalaji at Rs 100 crore to Rs 150 crore a year for the next two-three years while revenue scales up, expecting to break-even within the next three years," the company said in the 2017-18 annual report.

It expects to be in an investment phase for the over the top (OTT) platform for the next two to three years.

"ALTBalaji will help position ourselves for further success in the coming years and ride on the growth of digital content consumption for individual audiences worldwide," it added.

Reliance Industries had acquired 24.9 per cent stake in the company in July last year at an investment of Rs 413 crore and the content production company had then announced that the investment would be utilised to speed up content development initiatives, especially for ALTBalaji, to help it compete with other global and Indian OTTservice providers.

"We believe ALTBalaji is the future of the company and we will make sizable investments in this segment. We will make continuous but controlled investments in the digital platform and are well funded to make these investments," the company said in the report.

The company is debt free and has over Rs 442 crore in mutual fund investments, which will allow it to pursue growth without raising fresh capital, according to the annual report.

ALTBalaji has a distribution tie up with telecom and internet service providers and its content is available on Reliance Jio, Airtel TV and Vodafone Play platforms.

According to industry estimates, the video viewing audience in India is expected to grow significantly in the near future at a CAGR of over 13 per cent. By 2020, India is expected to become the second largest video-audience globally.

The online video audience in the country are expected to reach about 500 million by 2020 from 250 million in 2017, a two-fold growth driven by increasing mobile penetration, internet speeds, the advent of 4G and falling data charges, as per the industry estimates.