India Needs To Shift From Importing To Exporting Content, Says Abundantia Entertainment's CEO Vikram Malhotra

Abundantia Entertainment, known for hits like ‘Airlift’ and ‘Breathe’ is charting an ambitious course for expansion. Founder and CEO Vikram Malhotra reveals his plans for a Rs 750 crore content slate over the next two years while seeking strategic investment of Rs 200-250 crore to fuel its expansion plans, in an exclusive conversation with BW Marketing World. 

Excerpts:

You have been in the M&E industry for over 15 years now, starting 2009 and founded Abundantia Entertainment in 2013. What have been your learnings and how to plan to channel them in the company today?
Across these 15 years, I think the learnings are largely in two brackets. For the media and entertainment world, content creation and consumption is inherently unpredictable. Content creation and content consumption range from low to high investment, low to high interest. The key thing is how one stays relevant and that applies to everything that we know is going to change and everything that we know is going to be constant.

We believe that high-quality storytelling, content that connects, inspires, educates, stimulates and entertains is always going to be in demand. Therefore that goes into the bucket of what's not going to change. What's going to change is going to be the tastes and preferences of what content the audience consumes, how they consume, what devices are used, what's the manner and form of consumption, how we stay relevant across mediums and to cater to those changing tastes and preferences has also been something which has remained dynamic, but a key part of our strategy throughout.

You are looking for a strategic partner to raise Rs 200-250 crore. Would you like to tell us more about the rationale behind it?
There's a threefold rationale behind capital infusion that is sought at Abundantia. We had raised very high-quality capital from partners in 2013-14, which helped us launch and fuel the path for our first few years.

This time, the capital infusion into Abundantia is to bolster our slate and allow us to do more. We already have a slate that is valued close to Rs 750 crores over the next two years across films and shows. The strong part of this slate is that a majority of it is spoken for in terms of its alignment with platforms and studios, which gives it that much more tangibility. Bolstering this slate would mean not only increasing the width of what we are doing over the next two years but also continue planning a rolling slate for the years beyond it.

The second reason is for us to be able to improve our financial margins on a project basis. The idea is how are we able to cherry-pick what we want to monetise through pre-sales and how do we want to approach the theatrical market and hold some of that risk internally? To improve our ability to invest and hold just a little bit more of our future slate and thereby improve our operating margins.

The third is a forward-looking requirement, built on the firm belief that India needs to go from being an importer of content to an exporter of content. At Abundantia, I put it as a key pillar of our future where we create uniquely Indian stories for the world.

We have great examples in the markets of Korea, Latin America, Britain that have created content that's travelled westward and eastward. India has such a strong heritage of storytelling. For these three things to happen and unlock significant value for Abundantia over the next five years, external capital is important in accelerating the achievement of those five years.

Will we be witnessing any change in the business model post the capital infusion?
The idea is to leverage the capital to accelerate and scale up the existing business model by unlocking value using the levers that are in existence now. How can we tap newer markets and high-growth segments? How can we time our sales and our outreach to the market, both theatrically and otherwise, in a manner that helps our operating margins at an organisational and at a project level? The business model has proven that it is working and is in connect today as well as set for the future.

The idea is how can we scale this up and expand it geographically. Moreover, the plan is to scale up our operations to talk to a bigger market, do more of what we do well and continuously keep innovating.

You stressed targeting the younger demographic. What makes you believe this audience will drive revenue growth, being in the media and entertainment sector?
Statistically, the 25 to 30-year-old segment forms the highest amount of movie-goers in this country. They're also the ones with the disposable incomes and time and money to be able to consume more on streaming via the internet. That forms the hard logic behind this.

The soft logic is that this is the segment that's most open to newer, innovative stories and formats. This therefore becomes the sweet spot that we'd like to talk to also through our own research and otherwise. In the world of content, once the younger audience buys into a story, a character or a franchise, they are fans for life and building fandoms on these audiences which results in significantly higher returns on investment as windows increase as time passes and the same audience keeps consuming more of the franchise. We've realised that from a business standpoint as well, this is the most lucrative segment to focus and this is also the segment that stays with you for a longer period of time.

What is your expectation from 2025 in terms of revenue from 2024? What key goals has Abundantia Entertainment set for the coming year?
We are slated to hit 30 per cent growth on our top line on the back of three very successful years of growth that we've already had, driven by the robust slate and the output that we are targeting over the next two years.

What Abundantia is doing over 2025 and 2026 is where I see the industry headed, which is more differentiated, more clutter-breaking, storytelling growth in the streaming world, not just in terms of numbers but also in terms of engagement. I mean this across the board. I mean this in award to SVOD and a definite increase in cinema footfalls backed by our ability to create unique stories there as well. I don't see the one-size-fits-all definition of theatrical films continuing for too long. The storytelling skills will be required to navigate in 2025-26.

Indian content has been making strides in the West as well and is now recognised globally. As a part of the film industry, how do OTT platforms and broadcast channels impact the business?
I think what streaming has done over the last seven or eight years is expand the market substantially. It is an incremental and additive form of content consumption and distribution that's now present in the Indian market which was till the advent of these players limited to either broadcast television or big-screen theatrical consumption. It in many ways is also the way of the future. It is technology-backed. The consumption side of this has gotten entirely democratised.

In theatres, the audience watches in an external environment, in a community setting and has limited choice on what's available. That's that weekend in broadcast viewing - it's appointment led.

In streaming, the explosion of choice and control that it enables has been unparalleled. It also allows for personal device consumption which the earlier medium wasn't able to enable to the extent streaming does. What also makes India extremely different to the West is the cost of access in our country is relatively lower. In many ways, streaming has broken the barriers and borders to international content coming in and Indian content going international.

We recently saw Dharma Productions undergo changes, with Serene Productions acquiring a 50 per cent stake due to challenges in the entertainment industry. How do you plan to create compelling content that engages global audiences and ensures business sustainability?
The larger part of the market needs to look at our industry and our plans and aspirations as being built for positive endeavours. The need for capital infusion is to fuel our growth. Ambition does not come from a position of challenges in the industry, comes from a position of opportunity in the industry. I see this as a promising trend because not only do you get access to capital leading to growth and better financials and creation of value all around. You get to a more mature state of the industry and I think that's the need of the hour. Synergies get unlocked, value gets created when high-quality players come together.

While the opportunity exists at an industry level, in some cases it could be to unlock synergy and in others, it could be to tide them over desperate times. Overall, if there is better high-quality external capital coming in from strategically sound players like what we've just seen with Dharma and Serene, I think it's a very welcome development for the larger industry.

Reema Bhaduri

BW Reporters The author is the Editorial Lead at BW Businessworld. Majorly writes on marketing, advertising, experiential marketing and retail. She closely looks upon the vertical of BW Marketing World and BW Retail World.