After Disney's plan to offload Star(completely or partially), many are portraying like the network become a sinking ship so that Disney decided to sell it. But for me Disney days of Star is overwhelming. I too had doubts on fate of Star when it went to the hands of Disney from Fox. How Disney will treat the network, Is it get a full fledged support like from Fox..? Shunted UTV shadows was there that time. So many high profile exits happened eventually. But Star able to continue its growth under Disney. Everybody thought Uday's exit will hit the company. Reality is the new head K Madhavan and team able to drive the network even better than Uday Shanker. From Disney side the financial support was good as like Fox. From the covid times to till now the whole network yielded their best in history. When it comes to rating, it is no:1 in 5 languages at a time while competitors able to achieve it from 0-2 no:s. Destructed the empire of Zee Marathi, regained crown from Zee Bangla etc are the major gains. Star Plus, Star Maa standing unquestioned by rivals these time. It generated 17K crores revenue which is the highest ever revenue a network able to make( the 2nd one's revenue stand at less than 10k crores). But they did some big - enthusiastic spendings on sports so that their balance sheet gone wrong. Even the revenue generated from those properties was the best but as the expense is higher created pressure situation.
Afterall why Disney seeks selling Star.? The core issue is with its ultimate parent in US. Bob Iger returned as CEO in a situation which Disney is going through big financial issues. Its movies are failing continuously at box office, Streaming revenue not gone par with expectation, other divisions made poor performance. So inorder to overcome the crisis Iger announced some cost cutting measures. Removing conventional TV from Disney's core buisness is one of the decision. So they made plans to off load its TV assets globally(not only in India) So it include ABC, ESPN etc.
Disney likes to have bigger revenues in short span. They bought and run these all assets to nurture streaming.When it comes to India and Star, even if it made an 800 crore profit annually, its just 100 million USD - lesser than their budget for a single movie. For an Indian company 800 crore is big number. Running a vast company to get 100 million an year may not be fine for them. Also television in India has life but no growth. Means there will not be much expansion in revenue. Star touched almost a peak revenue. At the same time Ambani started an invasion in sports and streaming. Disney senses it all and found it better to leave than fight. This is the reason for sale plan of Star and not due to its any type of failure. And all these happened in a short span.
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