English print growth around 2%, Hindi print at 10%: ENIL

English print media industry is growing at around 2 percent while the Hindi print media is seeing a healthy growth of about 10 percent, says Prashant Panday, Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer, Entertainment Network India (ENIL). The television and radio industry witnessing around 10-12 percent growth, he adds.The biggest advertiser across ENIL's TV and radio business is the Central Government, says Panday. Government ads contributed to around 12 percent to ENIL's total revenue last fiscal.Revenues from State Governments vary from State to State, he adds.Ad revenues from the auto and consumer durables sector is slowly picking up.Below is the verbatim transcript of Prashant Panday’s interview to Prashant Nair & Ekta Batra on CNBC-TV18. Ekta: When did these three new channels launch and how are they doing? A: They just launched early this week, Monday. All of them in fact on Monday and what is important is that these are our second channel in these markets and what is more important is that these are the first set of cities where we have launched our second brand; the brand being Mirchi Love, so that is what Important about these three cities. Ekta: In terms of advertising right now 44 channels are what you basically run in the whole of the country. What kind of trends are you seeing in terms of advertising as compared to the previous quarter? A: Out of these 44 there are cities that we have acquired in phase three and there are just gone on air recently. These are cities where the business is just to starting to take off. Our effort is more on marketing them and launching the brand and spending the money on advertising and those kinds of things. There is a season coming up so therefore the business will pick up but their contribution really at this point in time is very small. Talking about the existing businesses, I must tell you this thing that many times the euphoria that we experience on this stock market for instance that is not visible on the ground. You will notice that media overall is the good reflection of how the basic economy is doing and what we find is that the core media is not growing more than 10 or 12 percent. So, that should be something that we should remember and that is how the business is doing. Prashant: What do you mean core media? A: Media is set to be a derivative business as they say. In other words if client do well then the media does well. Media is generally seeing about 10-12 percent growth and if you factor in about 6-7 percent of inflation then it is really a smaller growth. Prashant: You mean print specifically? A: Print is in a very bad shape. I believe English print is not growing more than 2 percent; Hindi print probably at 10 percent. Television channels and if you have noticed that the recent downturn that have happened, television won’t grow more than 10 or 11 percent. So, overall media sector is growing at 10-12 percent. Radio is probably doing a percent or 2 better. Prashant: Not true for everyone, Zee Entertainment for example since it is listed we get the numbers every quarter they are growing at 25 percent? A: Talking about Zee Entertainment it is a phenomenal company and they surprise us with results every year. It is an aggregate number, so if you break it and there is a lot of inorganic growth built in to that number. If you look at the like-to like basis like for instance the core channels that they have then I think that would probably report in 10-12 percent.