Q: You are not completely exiting the company as aprivate equity or a venture capital investor; do you believe that TV18’s participation could actually change the performance metrics of Infomedia then since you continue to be an investor and you are pumping in more money?

Renuka Ramnath: I certainly think that TV18 is a very attractive partner for Infomedia.  As a private equity investor, our job really is to build value in the company, build a very good company and hand over the company to worthy partner. We certainly think that TV18 is a very worthy partner and we are not in a hurry to exit the entire stock holding. I think we are happy for TV18 to have the controlling stake and we could time the exit on the residual shares as we go along.

Q: Can you just talk a little bit about the valuation of this deal and how keen TV18 is on the open offer being successful?

Chawla: Clearly as I said the asset is extremely valuable - the footprint of the company is massive, it is a natural footprint leader in the yellow page business, it has got a very vibrant specialty magazine business and has several B2B titles as well. I think the whole deal really hinges on a leverage that our other assets can bring in to this asset and how this asset will add value to other assets that we have in the group. So clearly, this marks the entry of our group into the print space and we hope to build the value out in this asset plus build out many more titles and make it the leading play in the print space.

On the valuation front, I guess the whole deal, the numbers are all known to everybody and we are extremely keen to have the open offer succeed when we would like to ensure that we can pick up as much stake as possible in the company.

Q: You have been with the enterprise for a long time- what do you see as the biggest growth trigger for the company? Is it what they are doing on the magazine publication side, is it what they are doing with the directories, what do you think is the biggest growth factor here?

Ramnath: There are three very large opportunities in this company, which is what we have been building in the company as well in the last three years.

The corner stone business for this company is really the directory’s business, which was flat when we acquired the company three and a half years back. That has been growing at the rate of 15%; we believe that the potential is much larger and if you combine an internet offering along with what we have been able to do on the ground, the opportunity can be much bigger as well going forward.

As far as the publications business is concerned again we have been able to get growth of upwards of 30% in the last three years. We have done four joint ventures with partnerships with international publishers; we have added about 10 titles in the last two and a half years. I think that there is a huge opportunity there in terms of specialty magazines that the Infomedia platform is ideally positioned to harness from the growth that is happening in the Indian market.

The third piece that we added after our acquisition of this company from the Tatas was the outsourcing piece, which is outsourcing of the pre-press publishing opportunity. Where again, thanks to the knowledge that this company has in terms of the requirement of publisher, we have been able to resist a very smart growth, the two acquisitions that we have done. We believe that in this space the opportunity to grow inorganically through acquisition is a bigger opportunity and adding the India leverage by way of backhanding many of the operations in India will be a very attractive growth engine for TV18, going forward.