ITV Network acquires Cent Percent!

Kartikeya Sharma of ITV Network buys majority stake in Cent Percent Media Solutions co-founded by Barun Das and Amit Tripathi.

On Saturday, February 23, 2013, Kartikeya Sharma, MD of ITV network, inked a deal with Cent Percent to buy a majority stake in the company. Cent Percent Media Solutions Pvt. Ltd. Funded by private equity investor is outsourcing adverting sales organization with its core focus on Regional and Niche TV brands. Cent Percent Media Solutions is the first entrepreneurial initiative by co-founders by Barun Das and Amit Tripathi. Till recently Barun Das was the CEO & Amit Tripathi, the Sales Head of Zee News Limited

Kartikeya has embarked on an aggressive journey to make ITV network the largest and most impactful news network in the country. He has recently acquired News X, a 24 hour English news channel which he plans to re-launch soon.  ITV network has another six channels including a national Hindi news channel, India News.  Deepak Chaurasia, arguably the most popular face of Hindi Television, is the new face of India News.

Commenting on this acquisition Kartikeya said, “Barun and his team have tremendous track record in managing news television business in the highly competitive genre. Barun and Amit have a phenomenal track record & have consistently demonstrated their competence & entrepreneurial mindset. Also given the proliferation of niche and regional channels that I foresee, riding the digitization of Cable distribution, Cent Percent  is an extremely exciting proposition”

R K Arora, CEO of ITV network, mentioned, “We now have the largest number of news channels for any network in the HSM markets. Our thrust is on content and marketing strategy, which has already started showing results."  

Barun Das said , “ Kartikeya has a great vision for his media business.  The fact that he found value in what we have set out to do, augments my confidence many folds. Regionalisation and Digitization are the primary growth drivers of TV media, where so far the profitability has been the prerogative of only a select few.  With capacity growing exponentially due to digitization, Indian TV industry is poised for the next big leap.  In a country of 1.24 billion people with 22 official languages,  niche and regional language channels would realize their true potential, now. I expect more 200 new channels, mostly regional and Niche, would be launched in next 3-5 years. Cent Percent would be a one-stop shop to meet the advertising revenue challenge of all niche and regional channels who may not find it viable to build a strong national sales team”

Amit Tripathi added, “we would have a strong national team with about 70 leading sales professional. Our initial plan is to build a bouquet of regional news channels which would be the biggest and most effective one from the point of view of national advertisers. Within the first fortnight of its operations, Cent Percent has signed up with seven high potential regional news channels. We are confident that before the new financial year, we would be setting up a bouquet of 10 regional news channels. Our primary bouquet would have 1 channel each from leading regional TV markets of India. We would carefully handpick those channels’