To deliver 10-12% higher bottomline in FY10: Zee Ent

Here is a verbatim transcript of the exclusive interview with Punit Goenka on CNBC-TV18. Also see the accompanying video.

Q: How is the outlook for advertising going forward? Are you seeing a pickup and what kind of pickup can we see? How strong or weak are the subscription numbers going to be as we go into this quarter?

A: As we have shared earlier, the visibility on the advertising front is still pretty much low. I do expect some upward changes to happen to the trend pretty soon. By the festive period, I think we should see reasonable growth coming from advertising itself. On the subscription side, we are expecting single-digit growth from the analogue market. But on the DTH front, we do expect a 50% growth over last year's numbers for this year.

Q: The education and film segment were the ones that appear to have shocked with an EBITDA loss of Rs 6 crore in that segment. Can you explain what happened and how are the prospects looking?

A: The film business overall has been down overall since last year. Also, the first quarter of this year's saw a strike between multiplexes and producers, which meant no films were actually released. Therefore, the losses incurred on that account were pretty high.

As far as the education business is concerned, the topline has seen a very good growth. Since it is in expansion mode, we have seen a marginal loss there.

Q: How would you see the situation playing out or do you think it is slightly unpredictable business? What's happening in the film business?

A: The film business just by the nature of the business is unpredictable as you all know. But definitely our focus will remain on more productive as well as films which are towards backward integration for our network itself. I think we are pretty well poised in that space to capture revenues as far as profitability going forward.  

Q: Your interest costs have been the positive surprise on the margins. What do you think you will play by way of interest cost for the full year? Do you see this reduction continuing?

A: Interest costs have various components on which a count it has come down. There were some derivative losses that we incurred last year which are not present in this quarter. Apart from that, there were also forex losses incurred by transfer of funds from our Indian company to our foreign subsidiaries - that incurred a major loss on that account. We also repaid some high interest loans in this quarter. Going forward, I do expect to pay a little bit more interest.