Tata Group weighs buying Temasek Holdings’ stake in Pay TV platform
Written by Baiju Kalish, BR Sanjay, and Elvi Chew
The Tata Group is considering an offer to buy back a stake in its entertainment content distribution platform from Temasek Holdings Pte as the Indian conglomerate weighs the delay to the initial public offering of Tata Play Ltd. , according to people familiar with the matter.
People said that the Tata Group is considering whether to delay the planned listing of Tata Play due to market conditions. Instead, the Tata Group has begun discussions with Temasek about a deal that would give the Singaporean state investor a long-awaited exit from its investment in the platform, formerly known as Tata Sky, the people said.
Temasek owns about 20% of the content distribution platform, one of the people said, and asked not to be identified because the information is private. A joint venture between the Tata Group and Twenty-First Century Fox Inc. A subsidiary of The Walt Disney Company, Tata Play provides pay TV via set-top boxes and streaming video via app, according to the company’s website.
People said Tata Play recently received the go-ahead from regulators to go ahead with the IPO. Its listing would have been the first of the $128 billion Tata Group business to go public since the $1.2 billion IPO of Tata Advisory Services Limited in 2004.
People said that discussions between the Tata Group and Temasek are ongoing and could collapse. They added that Tata Play could still choose to list if market conditions improved. Representatives for Tata Group and Temasek declined to comment.
Last year, Tata Play filed a confidential filing with India’s capital markets regulator, becoming the first Indian company to take advantage of the option to file IPO documents without making sensitive information public.
Founded in 2001, Tata Play has expanded beyond traditional pay TV and PVR services with Tata Play Binge, an OTT streaming service accessible via Amazon Fire TV Stick, Tata Play Binge + Smart Set Top box, Android TV, its mobile app, and the Tata Sons website. . It has a pan India footprint of 23 million connections.
Temasek first invested in Tata Sky, as it was known at the time, in 2007, according to its website.