Viewership for Q1 FY2022 dropped 17%: Rohit Gupta, CFO, ZEEL

Rohit Gupta, Chief Financial Officer, Zee Entertainment Enterprises Ltd (ZEEL), provided an overview of the media organisation’s performance in Q1 FY2022 during an earnings conference call. Gupta said that the second wave of COVID-19 had a less severe impact that the first wave in 2020, however challenges remained.

While releasing the financial results for the first quarter ended June 30, 2021, ZEEL pointed out that its domestic ad revenues for both Q1 FY22 and Q1 FY21 were impacted by lockdowns. However, the impact this year was much lower, reflected in the 127.9% YoY growth. Compared to Q1 FY20, domestic ad revenues were lower by 22.7%.

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On the subscription front, the embargo on pricing change due to NTO 2.0 litigation continued to hurt domestic television pay revenue growth. The 2% growth over Q1 FY21 is driven primarily by ZEEL’s digital business.

As in the case of the nationwide lockdown in 2020, content consumption saw an upswing during the lockdown/ curfew in the second wave earlier this year. While both TV impressions and reach saw a rise of 9% and 7%, respectively, the viewership for Q1 FY2022 dropped 17%. He attributed this drop to the combined effect of the disruption caused by the lockdown, BARC India updating its universe as well as “the soft performance” of some of ZEEL’s channels. July 2021 brought about a sharp recovery for ZEEL.

Regional markets like Bangla, Telugu, Kannada, Oriya, as well as movies buoyed ZEEL’s performance in Q1 FY2022. Gupta further said that the share of News and Movies genres increased, even as that of GEC genre declined.

On the other hand, ZEEL’s OTT venture, ZEE5, continued to gain momentum, backed by an expansive content catalogue. ZEE5 reported 80.2 million global MAUs in Q1 FY22, with 7.1 million global DAUs in June 2021. The average watch time of ZEE5 viewer per month stood at 190 minutes. The platform reported Q1 FY22 revenue of Rs 1,117 million, while EBITDA stood at Rs 2,033 million. The EBITDA loss excludes costs incurred by the business on ZEEL network.