Network18 to consolidate TV and digital news businesses

It creates India’s largest Integrated news media entity which will be platform-agnostic with the widest footprint across languages, straddling both TV and Digital.

"In terms of potential impact, we believe that it really made sense to get all the businesses under one umbrella. What this will do is you will be able to cross sell, you will be able to appeal to a larger set of advertisers, you will be able to bundle this entire offering around entertainment content, everything put together and even charge a sufficient fee to the customer. So I think this is a clearly very good thing in terms of revenue scale potential," said Karan Taurani , Sr VP-Research Analyst Media, Elara Capital.

The share exchange ratio is as follows: 100 shares of Network18 for every 172 shares of TV18 and 19 shares of Network18 for every 1 share of E18.

The streamlining of a two-layer listed company structure thereby presents a unique opportunity for an investor to participate in the entire media business as well as investments.

This will help eliminate holding company discount. The merged entity will be a mid-cap company with around ₹15,000 crore. of the market cap based on prevailing prices, and will lead to institutional investors and indices evaluating the entity more favorably than earlier.

The converged operations under a single entity will result in synergies in content, revenue, and costs. Will also eliminate inter-company transactions and borrowings.

It also creates headroom for any possible capital raise in the future for growth and deleveraging, as promoter holding will be around 57%, as against 75% currently.