A group of investors, led by Vinay Chhajlani, CEO of Webdunia.com India Pvt Ltd, and Jehangir S Pocha, former editor of Businessworld, has bought INX News, the company that runs English news channel NewsX. Chhajlani and Pocha have formed a company called Indi Media for the purpose. Business Standard, quoting industry sources, pegged the deal at Rs 50 crore.
Commenting on the sale, Indrani Mukerjea, Founder & CEO, INX Media, told Reuters, "Having created NewsX as a premier English News channel brand in such a short span of time, I hope channel would continue to grow from strength to strength and would retain its credibility as it always has".
Chhajlani is one of the promoters and CEO of Indore-based Hindi daily, NaiDunia and founder of Webdunia, while Pocha is the outgoing editor of Businessworld, who resigned from the ABP group earlier in the day to head NewsX.
INX News Pvt Ltd is a subsidiary of INX Media Pvt Ltd, a broadcast company promoted by former Star India CEO Peter Mukherjea and his wife Indrani Mukherjea.
The domain-b.com website had some inside info: [Link]
Sources told domain-b, that the investors had been pressuring the promoters to sell their stake and allow a new management to take charge due to constant differences between former CEO Vir Sanghvi and co promoter Indrani Mukherjea on running the news channel, that ended in Sanghvi's ouster, along with a raft of other senior executives earlier last year, prior to the chnnel going live.
Sanghvi, now with the Hindustan Times Group, who was also on the board of INX held a 3-per cent stake in the channel. Following Sanghvi's departure there had been speculation about the sale of INX News as the channel suffered low TRPs. It is also believed that the company was also facing a liquidity crunch and was unable to meet payrolls and payments for its leased equipment.
The INX Group comprises four companies - human resources firm INX Services Private Limited and INX Executive Search Private Limited; media broadcasting firm INX Media Private Limited and INX News Private Limited - all of which were built from scratch with a strong projection in internationally.
Betweem 1996 and 2007 INX was exclusively HR focused. In 2007 when Peter Mukerjea came aboard unofficially (he was bound by a no compete clause from Star) the company diversified into media. Sources inicate that only INX News has been sold and INX Media Ltd, which holds the entertainment channels, has not be sold. It is possible that the promoters will look for other buyers for it.
Business Standard wrote about the Indore-based promoter: [Link]
Media industry experts say the “low-value” purchase” fits in with Chhajlani’s new-found aggression in the media business. Established in 1947, today the newspaper company has two publications, Nai Dunia and Nav Dunia, with a combined circulation of 600,000 copies a day in Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh. It launched a Delhi edition of the newspaper recently. A weekly Hindi newspaper called Sunday Navi Dunia will soon be launched in nine state capitals including Lucknow, Patna, Ranchi, Delhi, Chandigarh, Mumbai and Jaipur, among others.
The group also owns Webdunia, the largest multilingual portal available in nine languages. With an email service in 11 languages, it gets 80 million page-views a month.
