Stellar opening for GBN on NSE, BSE

Mumbai: Shares of leading English news channels group Global Broadcast News (GBN), got listed at Rs 417.10 with 66.84 per cent premium on the Bombay Stock Exchange on Thursday.

The shares got listed at Rs 451, (a premium of 70 per cent over its issue price of Rs 250) on the National Stock Exchange.

GBN, a part of the TV18 group owns and operates some of India's leading news channels like CNN-IBN, CNBC-TV18 and Internet portals.

The company proposes to utilise the net proceeds of the IPO issue to finance acquisition of lands, meet construction cost and repayment of loans.

Managing Director of GBN Samir Manchanda and CNN-IBN Editor-in-Chief Rajdeep Sardesai gave a detailed view of what the listing means to the company.

Q: How do you view the listing in terms of growth for the TV 18 network?

Samir Manchanda: The rating of CNN-IBN have gone up in the recent few months. Revenues chase viewer-ship and we clearly see more revenues growth coming in from CNN-IBN. We are looking forward to expansion in further channel.

Q: What sort of margins do you think can the company sustain?

Samir Manchanda: Our quarterly results will come out very soon. We have done fairly well in terms of ratings during the past six months. We are seeing great visibility in terms of revenues.

Q: What is the next big step for GBN in terms of programming perspective?

Rajdeep Sardesai: That’s a tough one. Had you asked me this question a little earlier, perhaps I would have given you all the answers. For now, I would only say, watch the space.

We are poised to grow, in what direction and what space is something that next remains to be seen. We obviously have plans and as we strengthen ourselves those plans will come into effect. We would rather have a firm plan in place and then make the announcement.

Q: Would GBN primarily remain a news broadcasting entity from product perspective or do you plan to foray into other segments may be like print or internet, or perhaps the non-news kind of genres.

Rajdeep Sardesai: We may not consider non-news at least for the time being but our media vehicle might grow in other directions. We are already present into internet, mobile and other media technologies. Our website IBNlive.com gets more page views than any other website in the country. But our core competence is in news.

We would like to stick to our competence by the various media vehicles that are available today. We know news, that’s in our DNA and we believe there is huge hunger for information, which we would like to satisfy.

Q: What do you have to say about the Hindi news channel (IBN 7) part of the business?

Rajdeep Sardesai: IBN7 is of course the next big challenge on our focus. I see great amount of growth compared to where we were six months ago. CNN-IBN has been a big success story of the last 12 months. 2007, hopefully this will be the year of IBN 7.

Q: To what extent is CNN-IBN contributing to the growth of TV 18 network?

Rajdeep Sardesai: I think we are headed in the right direction. Ours’ is a step by step journey, a long one though. GBN listing is another day in it. I think it’s a milestone that we have achieved. We had a dream to build a journalist driven channel. And with the team of people and the distribution support that we have, we are going strong.

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