MUMBAI: Dish TV, Zee‘s demerged direct-to-home (DTH) company, has added substantial subscribers in the first quarter of this fiscal but losses have mounted on the back of subsidies due to intense competition.
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Net loss stood at Rs 897.64 million while the company claims to have added 180000 new subscribers during the quarter ended 30 June 2007. |
| Operating revenues were at Rs 892.86 million while expenditure stood at a whopping Rs 1.38 billion. Dish TV‘s main expenses are towards content, selling and distribution, employees and administrative.
Operating loss was Rs 488 million as the company says it has been investing on growth. Commenting on the performance, Dish TV chairman Subhash Chandra said: "The standalone revenue has increased to Rs 893.37 million up by 35 per cent as compared to the last quarter of the last fiscal year. This quarter we have consolidated our efforts in capturing more market share and due to this Dish TV continues to be a dominant market leader. The strength arises not just from numbers of subscribers, but also through Dish TV‘s commitment of ‘providing wholesome entertainment to every Indian‘, that translates into an unbeatable basket of content and value added services and a robust infrastructure of sales and service to take it to market." Added Dish TV MD Jawahar Goel: "A strong regional content is one of our strongest muscles. To ensure the bandwidhth for this width of content, we have recently acquired two additional satellite transponders. Also, we have adequate capacity expansion planned for the future." Dish TV has enhanced its infrastructure and services in the quarter. "A dealer universe of 30,000 outlets today caters to consumers across 4300 towns. There are over 10,000 service personnel in the market, delivering installations and service support to our subscribers. The service organisation is also supported by 1000 call centre agents speaking 10 different languages from 7 different locations. Moreover there are service centers across the country, all in an effort to reach the consumer in the shortest possible time, if the need arises," the company said in a statement. Dishtv has content strength of 170 channels, adding eight channels in the quarter. Dish TV CEO Arun Kapoor said, "We are poised for an explosive growth; and we will set the rules that will define the category in the country. The last quarter has been driven by consumer offers that helped us acquire 180,000 new subscribers helping us to retain dominant market leadership. This reinforces our connect with the consumers in terms of brand preference. This also supports our belief that increasingly large parts of the country are choosing to go digital on the Dish platform. These offers that we have rolled out over the past quarter have enthralled consumers with their great value for money proposition as well as helped us build awareness and usage of our unique services like sports active, movie on demand and regional content. Further, we have also enhanced our ground presence through substantial aggregation of company warehouses, distributors and dealers across markets, thereby increasing our speed to market." |
