Veteran media industry executive Rajiv Bakshi has moved again— and this time to Zee Entertainment in a leadership position after a stint as the CEO of Reliance Entertainment’s Big Synergy, a content creator.
“With sincere humility and extreme pleasure I want to share with you that I have joined the leading Indian media company Zee Entertainment Enterprises Limited as its COO, Revenue,” Bakshi said a LinkedIn post.
Incidentally, at Zee, Rajiv Bakshi would be reporting to his former boss at Discovery India, Rahul Johri, who joined Zee last year as President, Business for the South Asia region. Rajiv Bakshi was VP and head, Marketing & Products at Discovery.
Over the last 24 months, Zee has been undergoing restructuring, which include new manpower, cutting down on some business segments and keeping pace with digital developments by expanding streaming platform Zee5 reach and areas of access in different geographical markets.
In Q3 FY 2020-21, Zee said its domestic advertising grew by 7.5 per cent and domestic subscription revenue upped by 9.3 on a like-to-like basis. Consolidated revenue grew by 33.2 per cent to Rs.27,293 million. Underlying EBITDA (excluding content syndication revenue and cost) stood at Rs. 6,375million (EBITDA margin of 29.3 per cent).
While continuing to be a strong No. 2 entertainment network during Q3 and cornering an all-India viewership share of 18.2 per cent, Zee said it also launched two new channels—Zee Zest and Zee Vajwa — taking the network channel count to 47. During this period, Zee5 released seven movies on ‘pay-per-view model.