‘We don't have any compulsion to go for IPO tomorrow'

New Indian Express

9 hours ago

Bengaluru-based media technology company Amagi, which has initiated an initial public offering (IPO) process recently, is now expanding into Japan, Australia, Latin America, France and Germany. In an interaction with Uma Kannan, Baskar Subramanian, CEO & Co-Founder of Amagi, says they are seeing a tremendous opportunity in front of them for the next 10 years where they can build extremely large media tech company in the world and that they don't have any compulsion to go public tomorrow. The company's annual revenue in FY24 stood at Rs 942 crore. Edited excerpts:
You are a media SaaS unicorn and have been in the business for over 15 years now. What does the market look like?
Our customers are TV channels, content creators, live producers, sports news, and anybody who is creating content in the mid-tier to large enterprises. We don't work with the creator economy and influencer economy today; we don't have any product portfolio for it, but we work with the larger mid to enterprise sort of customers. Fundamentally, the world is becoming streaming, and all of us are only watching on IP, internet devices, be it on our phone or connected television, what we call smart TV in India. This has changed things for our customers. One, it's fragmentation of viewership. In the early days of cable, you could go to one channel and always watch the content. Now there are so many places where people are consuming content, be it YouTube, Netflix, Prime, social platforms, connected TV devices to everywhere else and this is becoming a big challenge for the broadcasters and TV channels. This is very similar to what happened in the retail industry. Suddenly people are buying in supermarkets, e-commerce stores and now quick commerce.
TV is now connected in every home in India. How are you looking at the Indian market?
In India, we have clients, and the country has obviously dramatically changed, given 5G connections. Here we work with Samsung, whose many channels are coming to Samsung TV Plus with the back-end being Amagi. We work with the likes of Republic TV, Times Now and Zee television and provide OTT content. India is a growing market and we have now started to expand but the country is only very close to about a percentage (1%) of our revenue. So, we continue to have a big focus on the international markets with 70% revenue coming from the US. However, we are seeing India as a growing market and it will start to become bigger and bigger for us as we go forward.
What are the market opportunities that you are seeing, and whether you have competitors in India as well as outside?
We started in the US, expanded into Europe, and then in Asia, we started in Singapore. We are now expanding into Japan, Australia, Latin America, France, and Germany. It's a global market and we are seeing a tremendous opportunity in front of us for the next 10 years where we can build an extremely large, world-class media tech company in the world. Amagi's competition is all traditional hardware players. And we are the only company in the world that talks about a glass-to-glass complete end solution.
It is reported that you are looking to raise Rs 3,200 crore through a public listing. Are you planning to hit an IPO soon?
If we go for an IPO, we'll go in India. Going through the process, understanding and evaluating markets are very different. We don't know when we do it because timing matters in this industry. As a company, we don't have any compulsion to go for an IPO tomorrow. We are a profitable company, we have money in the bank and we have investors who came in 2022. So, the idea is that eventually we will have to be a public company. If the market is really good, then maybe by the end of the year (we will go for the IPO), or else next year.