 non-listed private media entities are very cagey about sharing their numbers but this is the second year in a row that Times Internet is releasing an annual report on their own putting out all the numbers out there on display and to discuss more on this we have with us Satyana Gajwani, Vice Chairman Times Internet joining us all the way from San Francisco. Hi Mr. Gajwani. Hi Nita, how are you? Good and thank you for joining us. Thank you, thank you for having me. Let me start with the most important question. Can you tell us why Times Internet a private company has thought it important to release these comprehensive figures yet again and is that going to be a practice every year? Yeah well so we started it last year and I think it's something that I would like to continue for the foreseeable future. Part of part of what happens for us is we have about 6,000 employees across the company. We've got investors and a couple of our underlying assets and just generally we have stakeholders across the Times Group and outside who are our advertising partners and whatnot who genuinely care about what's happening. The Times Group and Times Internet traditionally have been pretty private about really sharing more than what's required but in a way I feel like being more explicit and transparent about what we're trying to do helps us really build alignment across everybody internally and externally. The truth is we don't really think of ourselves facing much direct competition as much as ourselves and so in a way being very public about where we are and what our aspirations are actually I think brings better accountability onto the business teams and the management to really deliver against those goals and be aligned around trying to achieve Fantastic. You registered a 40% growth last year and I think 24% this year going by the report. So tell me what are the gambles that really paid off you know what were the plan risks that you took can really really work for you? Yeah I mean I think the revenue is obviously the easiest way to measure the company for us. Every business is in a different stage and so sometimes we see some that are more mature than others. So for example I think certainly the most successful sort of transition in the last year has been with MX Player which really went from not really being competitive or existing in the premium OTT space to now becoming the market leader and that's widely sort of understood and we did that with a very untraditional strategy of buying a non-video asset and building a video property into it and that's been very successful for us. The growth that we've seen there in consumption is pretty unparalleled and the revenue growth is pretty strong as well but really our priority in the first couple of years of MX Player was to really establish product market fit and get people to love it. The early feedback is very strong in that regard and so today when we look at times internet as an ecosystem five years ago we weren't really from a media side beyond news we weren't really that relevant. Today our media asset or our entertainment assets specifically Gauna and MX now reach over 400 million monthly users and they represent almost half of the reach of the group now on digital and so you know our entertainment footprint has really been on the media side our strongest success in the last couple of years. And what are the gambles that did not fail? Yeah okay I didn't have that one ready let me think about it for a second. I won't say they haven't paid off as much as they haven't succeeded yet to the scale that we want them to. You know the thesis of times internet is that we can be both a really strong media business and then a really strong services and transactions business and the reason that these should all exist in one company is that they're symbiotic. The media businesses bring in very large audience spaces but those transactional businesses really monetize very well because people use them to buy goods to avail services to do much more than just simply consume content. And so the thesis is that if we get good at what we're trying to do the media businesses bring in users and then we can funnel some of them to the transactional businesses where we monetize them very well. The other reason it's symbiotic is that the transactional businesses have data that no other ecosystem really has. So for instance today we have the capability of saying target people looking for two bedroom homes in Noida across our network because we can leverage data signals that we get from magic bricks and use them across the entire ecosystem. And so the thesis is that the media businesses bring users to the transactional businesses and the transactional businesses provide proprietary data back to our media ecosystem which makes it richer and more effective. It's kind of interconnected for you in this. Right. So that's that's the intent. The truth is that we've done it we built the plumbing so all of that actually exists as a capability because we do have a common identity stack underneath everything we do now which really gives us an intelligence and abilities that others don't have but I don't think we've leveraged it enough. One of my major priorities over the next few years is to push crosswalk as a metric for us to say how do we better pollinate users across our different properties. You know we make good progress last year I think the number of users who consume two or more of our properties grew 40 something percent and the number of users who consume three or more of our properties grew 120 percent but the base is still small and so if you ask me where we've not been as successful I think we have a lot more room to go in terms of actually getting good at leveraging the ecosystem's capability more than each underlying asset just being good on their own. You're talking about a property whose base is not really small it's pretty big. I want to come to MX player you know it has been one of your most exciting acquisitions and the most talked about but before I ask my question I want to understand from you since the time of acquisition MX has done about 15 percent if I'm not wrong from 175 million monthly active users when you acquired it to about 200 as per apani is that correct. No it's growing more than that and so there's two different things to look at one is sometimes we look at the India numbers and the global numbers MX is actually 70 percent of its consumption is in India the balance is outside and so sometimes we compare the India to the global numbers and so you might get mixed numbers there but the more important metric with MX isn't the total audience growth as much as the premium OTT growth so the way it works is when we bought MX it was a very very large asset to playback videos on your phone non-streaming videos we built a streaming product into it about 18 months ago and that streaming product itself has effectively gone from zero users to over 200 million monthly users and so in essence the total audience growth I think it's been closer to about 40 or 50 percent in the last year I don't have the number right on top of my head this is just the total audience is yeah just in India so the total audience has grown a certain extent but more important than the overall app growth has been the streaming product growth because that's really what is comparable to what's out there in the market and what today is really really large and sort of passing most others in that case let me reframe my question you know for most OTT apps the problem is to build audiences in your case luckily for you you already had a good base with your video playback app 175 million or so so tell me has it been difficult to convert them and get them to come to streaming you know as an OTT platform it's a great question and it was honestly the biggest gamble of what we did so we bought this asset for over a hundred million dollars I think we invested at that point in time without knowing if it would work and I think that has been where the majority of the team's energy has gone into thinking about how to make it as successful of a transition as possible that the the simple answer I can give you today is that more than 70 percent of our users every month consumes the streaming product and that was zero a couple years ago when it didn't exist so I think if you ask me what's been the biggest success for us it's been that ability to actually transition users over there's a lot of companies including us at times who talk about moving audiences from one product to another and I can tell you with probably more experience in doing this across different businesses than most have it's not easy but our strategy was different you know I think what we saw a couple years ago was that everyone was excited to say we're going to build the Netflix of India and so we saw 20 30 different OTT apps get launched saying oh I'm a good movie producer I'm a good TV show producer I'll make an app put them on there and people will come and subscribe and I'll grow really big and I think you know the core skill that we really have is really understanding digital consumer products and technology and where they can converge with the media ecosystem and I think one of the insights we had is that a successful product really needs to have as much of strategic thinking on distribution and growth as much as it does on content and so when everyone else was saying we'll make a bunch of shows and stick them on an app and then figure out how to get users we took the opposite approach which was if we had this very large captive entertainment consuming audience could we bring could we bring great content to them and build a positive experience and you know I think it's been a combination of good product tech strategies to make the conversion as well as just actually really good content I mean I have to give credit to that because it's a it sounds like a very traditional skill but like our recent show that we launched a couple weeks ago ashram I think it crossed a hundred million streams in the first week it's broken all of our internal records in terms of expectations on output but I think it's a mix of both and it really is emblematic of us as a company being really good at traditional media skills like producing great storytelling and content alongside having that sort of technology DNA to think about growth and app distribution and scale and conversion and a lot of behind-the-scenes back-end work to be effective in that and then bringing them together into just a good consumer experience it's a given though you spoke about ashram and then you also had queen which was quite which pretty much got the eyeballs tell me you have the great content out there but as far as subscription is concerned you have time prior times prime you have gana plus to i-e-t prime and go may password passport why have you kept mx player out of that ad-free model you're one of the few people who knows most of the actual subscription products we launch because we have too many out there right now as you can see but so there's two things here outside one is mx is two years old and I think you know particularly given that it was a fairly untested strategy to see whether you could successfully convert users we feel like filling product market fit was the first priority and actually getting customer engagement there the other the other thing that's pretty untraditional about mx and again it really has to do with more of our product technology DNA than anything is we've actually made it you know the phrase that defines it is every attainment and the reason we use that is that it actually has gone beyond video so today the mx player app actually offers music and gaming as well and so you know our intent is actually to be pretty different from the rest of the otts in the market and really think about we have this massive audience in india that's seeking consumer digital entertainment content and experiences part of that may be around video part of it may be around music part of it might be around gaming the most recent thing we launched is in the short form video space and so you know the way we think about it is can we really provide a holistic entertainment offering across different experiences and if we get really good at building that engagement so for example users who consume video and gaming have i think six x the monthly time spent of consumers who just consume video just to give you a sense on how this works and so our priority today is really to just fill that customer need the subscription models and figuring out new ways to monetize those will all develop over the next couple of years but but in my view this is like you're building the next you know what were the big tv networks that kind of dominated digital television media over the last five ten years we're building that for the digital world and this has a five ten near horizon to really get to that scale we're in year two so i think if we overemphasize monetization of this stage we probably mess it up a little bit you know you spoke about uh gaming you know that's become the new sensation among teens and you pretty much launched it at the right time i think February if i'm not wrong yeah that's right tell me i'm sure this report probably doesn't have much about gaming but how do you see that contributing to the revenues of times internet here on in a significant you know one of the one of the challenges for times internet is that we've got like so many big assets and then we've got a lot of emerging bets and so you know some of those emerging bets may make it some may not and we're pretty dispassionate about saying that we want to sort of be experimented about it but gaming is one of the sort of fast growing emerging bets for us so we have two essential plays in gaming we have a standalone app called curica and then mx has built gaming within the game within the mx app both of them are growing extremely well in general we stay away from things like poker rummy and the team but the type games which i think for us at least ethically don't feel like they fit for us as a company and we've also stayed away from fantasy and we focused a lot more on casual gaming and trivia where we feel like it's both light entertaining something that people can really engage with but not necessarily things that veer you're down sort of the the negative habits around things like gambling and whatnot that other apps sent in can potentially fall victim to i think so we think about gaming sort of as a broader space we've started with casual games and trivia as our starting footprint but if you think about it this way our goal is basically to think about better ways to monetize our audience over time we've built we have 550 million monthly users nobody in india comes close to that in terms of scale and so as we think about ways to better engage and monetize that audience gaming is probably the most natural segue from media and entertainment because it really isn't that space in between where it is in a form of entertainment in media but it is a place where at least globally there's a lot of trends of customers paying there's a very different level of engagement with gaming users when they get into it and so i do think you'll see us push more into the gaming ecosystem over the next few years and that would become a significant revenue creator for you is it hopefully by next year hopefully i mean it's growing much faster than the rest of than the average growth of times internet i think for example curricula i think has grown 600% this year again small base but meaningfully contributing in terms of scale i think it'll cross i mean i don't know what it'll exactly cross the deal but it's scaling very very fast right now another launch that happened recently is takatak you know i think the band the band on chinese apps was pretty much pretty godsend for all the indian companies you know z launched something called hippie and times launched takatak and several others and gana hot shops we launched too right right that too so tell me is takatak better place to replace tick tock for the indian audiences and you know build the kind of scale tick tock hide in india has in india rather yeah you know honestly it was it was funny we have a very strong product and technology team across times internet we have over a thousand products and technology engineers in the company which again i don't think any indian company would have that level of scale um unlike other i guess i can't say it's really unlike others but takatak is really a technology platform play at its heart there's an element about getting creators and building really good content experiences but it's so much about really efficient fast seamless videos uh streaming and capabilities there and then it's about really good personalization and recommendation algorithms i was honestly pretty skeptical when we launched it saying look there's going to be many players in the market i don't know how big it'll scale up but it's been two months and it has by far exceeded my expectations on where i thought it could get to um we are extremely bullish about it because we do feel like um the space you know we there is a void right we know with tick tock not there there's a very large void and the consumption we've seen just in the last two months really is emblematic of how large the desire and consumer need is for it we also think it's really really complimentary with both our music and video platforms and that's why honestly we've launched two plays in the space uh we're definitely going to invest pretty aggressively behind both gana hot shots and mx takatak um they approach it a little bit differently ganas is a little bit more music centric first because it really fits with where they are and it's embedded in the gana app and mx is more of a general video entertainment approach um but both of them have seen phenomenal uptake from users i mean way more than we expected and so um you know ultimately again it really fits with our our core right we operate in this in the sort of the space between media and technology and i think short form video is very much a platform that operates in that space too and our early traction at least indicates to me that there's a lot more potential there and this is also with the year for ed tech applications uh you know you have something called grade up even though according to me it's one of the least known times internet properties uh you've obviously seen about forex growth as per the report for grade up tell me how are you planning to grade it further up you know that's a great question now great up is actually so great up started in in t labs which was our incubator uh that we had a few years ago and it was one of the teams that we saw so much promising that we gave an offer to acquire a larger stake in and back and so we've been financing it now for a few years um and the product quality and team quality is just fantastic there so great up i think we'll cross a hundred crores this year if i understand it correctly but it was less than 25 last year and so the trajectory that it's on is very strong the problem as as many of our assets faces when you're within times internet which you know this year did over 1600 crores of revenue um it's hard to uh it's hard to sometimes uh stand out independently of that um but what we love about great up is a few things that i think are really unique um one is that the user retention and product quality is really strong so so one of the metrics we look at is collections to revenue booked because if you sell someone an education product how many people actually want it enough that they end up paying for and our ratio there is like above 90 which is well higher than the average in the industry great up also has across different products that it offers over 200 000 subscribers which is a significant number um for both the live classes and the test prep work that they're doing so we're extremely bullish on it obviously it's seen big growth this year partially because of macro factors that have played in um it is a very competitive segment you know certainly migraines and unacademy raising significant money is something that we have to think about how do we play our strategy alongside it but in general our approach has been build the best product market it effectively bring customers to it and you'll find a good outcome and that's generally worked for great up so far and i think that's what we'll continue to do going forward and another observation i had is that you know your great um uh benetton colman that has excessively relied on its uh english publications over the vernacular banners over your over the years for revenue uh you know as a younger company i'm comparing it with the 160 year old company that's why you know 182 would you avoid a situation like that for time isn't it and focus more on vernacular languages here on you know even your report says the growth or non-english audience is out so how will you go further from here definitely so you know when we we today reach 550 million monthly users the majority of them are not english first speakers and and so most of our high-reaching products whether it's crick buzz even to i mx and gana all four of them are aggressively working on product development that is very very local language section so in fact today most people don't know this but all four of those apps give you the ability to select the language before you start including to you why which is different than what people would expect and you know if we look at our actual growth in usage in the last year almost 80 percent of the growth of the of the growth that we saw came from non-english audiences so we're investing very hard behind thinking about how to build experiences that are better for our first time mobile phone users non-english users and building experiences that are relevant for them from transactions and subscription strategy i think will probably be a little bit more balanced to see more from the english side because ultimately propensity to spend we still find to be stronger with english audiences and certainly things like personal finance and mutual fund buying and buying sort of more expensive products and going out to fancy restaurants that open to dine out you know inevitably those things skew more towards urban audiences where at least the balance of english non-english skews a little more to english but but it's important for us from the media footprint side certainly and we're investing very heavily behind building better non-english experiences um on the media side you know another thing is times internet started about 20 years ago and it pretty much had a head start over most digital firms in the country at that point you know i was reading one of your earlier interviews and you did confess that you know uh the t i l offerings weren't in great shape in the beginning of the last decade so after then came google then facebook right now would you say the pecking order would have been completely different had you been in an attack mode right from the beginning and didn't start really late you know it's been great for you for the past three four years but hasn't always been like that yeah um look i part of why we put out this report is to be very very honest and put a mirror in front of ourselves i do think one of the mistakes we made in the past was i actually think our ambition was not the issue we had very large ambitions for it but you have to be able to deliver the best experience against that ambition and i think we probably approached digital businesses a little bit too much like traditional businesses in the 2000s maybe the early 2010s um and that we put a lot more emphasis on things like content and brand and marketing more than on actual product technology and underlying engineering capability um you know the best reflection i can give uh the best statement i can give that reflects the sort of changed culture and priority is that the ceo of times internet got them sinna was at one point the former cto of the company and many of the senior leaders of the company today it came from engineering and product backgrounds not from media backgrounds and you know ultimately media is always going to be in our blood it's a core part of our dna but i think really making sure that we infused a very strong competence on product and technology and on um sort of really being able to deliver great underlying product experiences was a very very critical change that's helped us a lot the other thing that i think this honestly changed is that we've been a bit more dispassionate and honest about what's working and not and we look at our outcomes very binary if something is working we want to double down triple down on it really scale it up and see it get to market leadership position and if we don't think that's possible then we won't do it and we should look for exits or look for models to sort of scale down that kind of a business um and i think as long as we're honest with ourselves and we hold ourselves accountable to really being the best consumer experiences we can you know i think thus far it's delivered good results for us in the last 10 years um but but it does require an ability to be very very adaptive and recognizing that every six months you're going to face new competition in new forms from new places and if you're not ready to continue to deliver the best experience to your customers you're probably going to lose um and a little bit of that paranoia i think is healthy for the company so i'd like to ask you uh you know it's it's 2020 has been a rather bad year for everybody you know what is uh your sense of how things will perform for you on one hand you have something like your news business and your oddity which is exploding and on the other hand you have brands like dine out which obviously has seen better days because the lockdown is really not the right time so so how do you see uh the books spanning out for 2020 uh for march 2021 rather so it's it's a good question i think so i'll i'll address the first half of the year in the second half in the first half of the year our business is and i think again it's a it's a great part about our culture is that our teams feel very very emotionally aligned to the success of what they're doing and so very very proactively all of our businesses thought about ways to to manage their cost structures we took salary cuts we delayed variable pay um and we cut down expenses that really weren't critical because nobody knew what the next six months 12 months would look like you know while we've had some businesses that obviously have structural challenges in the current COVID environment specifically the ones that are very offline centric like you know going out to restaurants has affected dine out um most of our businesses were very lucky i've actually probably seen a either a very fast rebound or just a positive growth throughout the COVID times um in the case of dine out they've actually done a lot of business innovation and moved towards contactless dining product experiences that they can deliver to restaurants so today actually i think over two or three thousand restaurants have actually purchased the sort of contactless dining software sets that we've built out for our restaurants and malls and other offline experiences and are deploying it ready so i think there's a good amount of innovation there but for most of our businesses that are really digital first and digital only experiences honestly COVID has accelerated a lot of the growth trends over the last three to five years and so what happened was april may june or march april may you know even with growth and consumption we saw ad revenues fall because everyone was sort of uncertain but by august now we're actually positive year over a year i think by june or july we started to see positive growth month on month and by august it's rebounded so aggressively that we're actually up even including the the down months in the beginning of the year and so now we're in september we're we're sort of re-sinking up as a company to say okay first half of the year is about survival about you know managing your business correctly really hunkering down in hard times and thinking about what to do but now we're back and so now the second half of the year is okay how do we get back on our mission of chasing that billion dollar revenue target in the next few years and what are the things we need to do and what are the major goals we're going to sort of reset ourselves to achieve by the end of this fiscal year so in my view this year is a tale of two different halves half one was in a way probably good for us long-term it helped us sort of reevaluate cost structures make sure we've got our heads in order there and now the second half of the year is back to that growth trajectory that we've been sort of chasing for a while and have for the last few years and saying okay there's this new sort of customer readiness to assume digital products more than ever before how are we going to really capitalize on it and so we're very very excited about the rest of the year to be very honest and one last question i want to ask you is you know we all know you moved to us four years ago to expand the times internet based so i have to ask you what is the next big acquisition happening and is that happening soon and what space is it going to be in you can give us a clue so um you know we've acquired 15 businesses i think in the last five or six years and you know a lot of people think it was purely about business interest and it was to some degree but it was also a lot about cultural sort of transformation for the company you know probably one of the things i'm most proud of is that of the 15 businesses we've acquired i think 13 of the founders are still working with us today it was important because we really wanted to infuse real entrepreneurial culture into the company and i think we've been successful in doing that to be honest while we do look at m&a and we're going to continue to look at some i think earlier on the mandate was the mandate i put upon us was we just need to have really good products and we need to feel confident that we're building really good assets and so we looked at m&a opportunistically to say what are great assets that are probably not being recognized by others enough that we could really leverage and build up around today we've got a portfolio of very strong assets and so now when we think about m&a we think about it with really two major goals one is can it take an existing business of ours and make it better and so for example dine out was actually an m&a has actually done three acquisitions of its own to improve its software stack that it offers to restaurants so it bought in resto and a post prayer as well on that purpose so there's an extension of m&a which helps our businesses get stronger and what they're doing and then the second is when we think about the holistic strategy of times internet where we've got sort of a steady chugging along advertising business but then rapid growth on subscription and transactions there are pieces that are going to be important to helping us realize that vision of scaling those parts out and so very strategically we're thinking about some m&a and spaces that can fit to those missions and i can't say what exactly those are just yet but i think in general our we've got more you than we know what to do with we have you know more engagement you know we've grown to give you a sense we've grown daily active users 28x in the last five years it's you know it the audience scale is not our challenge we've got 110 million people using it every day for 45 minutes a day that is a huge amount of engagement well beyond any other indian company so now our mandate is what do we do with it and how do we better leverage it how do we build better experiences for the customers and how do we monetize it better and so when we think about m&a we think about things that can help us on that trajectory looking at a more aggressive times internet in the days to come and hope you continue to balance great content and technology and hope to hope i get to see more of you whenever you come to me i would love to catch up with you i appreciate i appreciate you actually you really have studied us and i appreciate that you spent the time to understand the assets of it you know before