The Walt Disney Company is reviewing its strategic options in India, the world’s most populous nation and one of the entertainment industry’s most challenging developing markets.
The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday that the conglomerate has spoken with at least one bank to discuss options on how to make its India business grow, while also seeing the cost burden shared. These options could include a sale of the business or a joint venture, the paper says.
Contacted by Variety, a Disney corporate spokesman in India declined comment.
Disney has spent heavily to buy a sizable market position in India. In 2019, it paid $71 billion to buy 21st Century Fox, with Fox’s TV assets in Asia and the Star pay-TV business in India among the crown jewels of the acquisition.
The value of those businesses has been fundamentally changed by the global strategy of streaming and in the competitive market of Asia. Disney is currently in the process of closing down many of the linear channels in East Asia that it acquired from Fox.
In India, the leapfrogging move to mobile broadband delivery of video services, which has brought with it tens of millions of new TV households, has also opened the doors to significant new competitors. Some of these are nimble local players, others are local-foreign ventures. The biggest challenger is JioCinema, part of the Viacom18 cluster, which is backed by Reliance industries and India’s richest businessman Mukesh Ambani.
As a result of the Fox acquisition, Disney is currently the market leader in streaming in India with its Disney+ Hotstar service. However, the loss of significant cricket telecast rights has weakened that product this year. The WSJ quotes anonymous sources saying that Disney+ Hotstar India could lose eight to 10 million subscribers in the third quarter.
The Indian streaming market is also a low ARPU and highly price sensitive one. Disney+ Hotstar India has subscription revenue of just $0.59 per month per subscriber.
The WSJ sources say that overall Star business (pay-TV and streaming) revenue for the fiscal year ending September 2023 is expected to drop around 20% to slightly less than $2 billion. Earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization are expected to fall roughly 50% for the same time period, from about $200 million last year. Fox had projected $1 billion EBITDA in 2020.
The current challenges at Star are not the first time that Disney has been wrong-footed in India. In 2012, it acquired UTV, one of India’s largest film studios and an operator of multiple TV channels. By 2017, it closed down UTV Motion Pictures, preferring instead to concentrate on distributing its Hollywood movies.
The Indian media landscape is a challenging one, requiring scale and patience. Sony has endured a more than 18-month regulatory wait as it tries to merge its own substantial TV operations with those of local heavyweight Zee Entertainment Enterprises. Other recent moves suggest that Warner Bros. Discovery is in no hurry to join the race to the bottom in Indian streaming by launching Max in the territory any time soon. In April, instead, WBD announced a multi-year HBO content licensing deal, switching allegiance from Star to JioCinema.