Comcast, Partners Present An Offer for Buying Stakes of India’s Zee Entertainment
A consortium including the U.S. cable giant Comcast Corp., James Murdoch’s Lupa Systems and Blackstone Group Inc. has presented an offer for buying a stake in Zee Entertainment Enterprises Ltd. That holds to be India’s largest private broadcaster.
The group plans to take in a total of 51% stake, totalling to the market value of about 190 billion rupees ($2.77 billion), as mentioned by a source. However, the bid is nonbinding in nature as told by folks.
A deal on the same is probably measured to be announced soon leading to more number of investors coming in for the grab. Deliberations are already ongoing but, might even be possible to not result in a deal. On being asked by the representatives for Comcast and Blackstone, they declined to put up any official comment on the same, while the Zee representative didn’t have any immediate comment to make.
As known from sources, Zee, the Mumbai-based broadcaster controlled by the former rice trader-turned-media mogul Subhash Chandra, is looking for some strategic investors who could help them pay off the debts of the parent group and help them aid their competition with the other streaming giants Netflix, Amazon and several other local TV channels fulfilling the India’s booming demand for fresh content.
If the deal comes in it would offer Comcast, Lupa and Blackstone have a control over Zee’s deep library of fresh content and its ZEE5 platform that offers Bollywood films and over 90 television channels streaming in 12 languages as on-demand via Internet.
Adding to the sources info, it has been revealed that the shares of Zee have slipped 0.2% in Mumbai on Tuesday, while the S&P BSE 100 Index was slightly changed. On the other side Comcast was down 0.8% in the morning New York trading.
