WarnerMedia India's FY21 revenue declines 14.46% to Rs 376.75 crore

Time Warner-owned WarnerMedia India's (formerly Turner International India) revenue for the fiscal ended 31st March has dropped 14.46% to Rs 376.75 crore from Rs 440.48 crore in the previous fiscal.

Advertisement revenue dropped 35.48% to Rs 95.8 crore from Rs 148.5 crore. Subscription revenue was down marginally by 3.14% to Rs 258.5 crore from Rs 266.9 crore. The company earned Rs 16.6 crore from promotional licence fee, which is a 12.3% drop from Rs 14.78 crore a year ago.

Total expenditure dropped 17.47% to Rs 358.9 crore from Rs 434.9 crore. Cost of distribution rights fell 39% to Rs 138.7 crore compared to Rs 227.8 crore. Marketing and carriage fee declined 17% to Rs 126.5 crore from Rs 108.3 crore. Promotional licence expenses were down 12% to Rs 7.75 crore from Rs 8.8 crore. Advertisement and publicity expense dropped 53% to Rs 3.7 crore from Rs 7.8 crore.

Net profit swelled to Rs 15.3 crore as against Rs 54 lakh. The company refused to comment on the FY21 financials.

WarnerMedia imports, promotes, markets, distributes and provides sub distribution rights to cable and broadcast entities, the products of Warner Media Group of Companies. It also distributes the television programming services operated by Turner Broadcasting System Asia Pacific (TBSAP) and CNN for entertainment & news channels to households, hotels & broadcasters and procurement of advertising sales. It is also involved in providing support services for production/display of TV Programmes to TBSAP.

As part of strategic re-evaluation of business operations, the management of the company had decided to discontinue the operations and transmission of television programming services of HBO, HBO HD and WB channels on all platform with effect from December 15, 2020. The uplinking and downlinking licences obtained from Ministry of Information and Broadcasting (MIB) had been surrendered by the company.

Currently, the company owns and operates four channels, Cartoon Networks, Pogo, CNN and Cartoon Network HD+. It plans to launch HBO Max streaming service in India next year.

During the year, Ow Yoke Hong had resigned from the post of Director of the company with effect from 31st December 2020 and Muthuram Natarajan was appointed as the Additional Director of the Company with effect from 19th February 2021. Further, after the closure of FY21, Siddharth Jain had resigned from the post of Managing Director of the company with effect from 30th April 2021.