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Editor's note: There aren’t too many companies that announce resignations with a press release. Not in India, at least. This week saw an exception. On Tuesday, the media firm Viacom18 announced that its group chief executive officer of eight years, Sudhanshu Vats, is moving on from the company. Viacom18 is a subsidiary of Reliance Industries-owned media giant Network18 Media & Investments. A joint venture between US media conglomerate Viacom Inc. and TV18 Broadcast, the television arm of Network18, it operates more than 50 television channels, three video streaming platforms and a movie production studio. Vats’s resignation is a fascinating one, the latest in a slew of top-level exits from Viacom18 over the past 18 months or so. The years 2018 and 2019 have seen the exits of Raj Nayak, chief operating officer; Monika Shergill, executive vice president and head of content at Viacom18 Digital Ventures; Anuj Poddar, senior executive vice president and business head; Narayan Ranjan, chief of staff and former group CFO; and Sidharth Kedia, executive vice president and head of strategy, M&A, data science and e-sports. Of these, several, if …
Telecom and retail both continue with their ‘hit and miss’, while O2C delivers an unsurprisingly poor performance in Q4. This is a year RIL will be glad to see the back of.
NDTV and Network18 are now firmly loss-making—and show little urgency to fix the fundamentals.
Telecom and retail, which account for half the conglomerate’s revenue and most of its valuation, aren’t accelerating fast enough to justify their price tags.