Dear Valued Shareholders
We have all been through an extremely difficult two years. The COVID-19 pandemic has
had a significant impact on lives, livelihoods, and the business. Restricted movement and
disrupted supply lines caused the operational challenges to mount during the pandemic
months. However, even amid the multiple COVID waves, we did not waver from our sustained
focus on ensuring uninterrupted Broadband and Cable TV services, while meeting the
evolving consumer needs and demands triggered by the unprecedented crisis. We continued to
protect our business model, even as we focussed determinedly on safeguarding the health
and safety of our people.
With the pandemic catalysing a new surge in demand, the FTTH segment of our business
saw a healthy 20% growth in revenue earning customers in these challenging times. However,
our Cable TV business health was challenged due to a multitude of extraneous consumer and
environmental factors. Limited original content, financial stress experienced by consumers
in the COVID world, and multiple lockdowns led to many of them moving from metros to their
home towns in this period. This, in turn, caused the bottom of the pyramid consumers to
shift to Value offerings, thereby limiting our ability to monetise this business.
Armed with our in-depth industry knowledge and consumer understanding, we responded to
the situation with a powerful thrust on Cable TV network expansion and transformation.
Coupled with digital innovation, customer delight and workforce agility, this enabled us
to successfully navigate these unprecedented times.
In line with this strategy, we rolled out more than 140 new towns and added more than
3,000 kms of fibre network during the year under CATV Business. With our innovative
next-generation HD, HEVC and OTT set-top boxes delighting customers, we scaled our
consumer proposition for millions of our new TV consumers. These boxes host many new
exciting industry-first features, such as Time Shift - enabling users to watch a programme
on one channel while recording a programme on another, Radio Channels, among others. We
have also initiated a Cable TV network transformation project, aimed at ensuring that our
network is benchmarked to telco standards in terms of uptime, redundancies, resiliency and
proactive monitoring.
Augmenting our digital outreach, we have applied AI, automation and other exponential
technologies to make workflows more intelligent. AI & ML based VoiceBOTs have been
rolled out across all our call centres to improve the quality of troubleshooting of
consumer issues. Our ChatBOTs roll-out has enhanced customer experience, facilitating
quick and seamless resolution of customer queries through Web/ App/WhatsApp interface.
I am happy to share that we have effectively deployed these digital platforms to
strengthen our Cable TV and Broadband businesses, and to acquire more customers, to
upgrade them and to reduce churn.
We are well aware of the radical shift in business reality in the post-COVID world.
Cognisant of this transformation, we have used this difficult year to invest in building
our organisational competencies to align them with the evolving market and consumer
demands and aspirations. We have focussed on developing our capabilities in crisis
management, enterprise agility, cost management, workforce resilience and innovation,
which we believe to be the pillars of our growth-centric business model. Initiatives are
also under way to leverage digital platforms to enhance the competencies of our partners
in Cable TV business, as more than 90% of our consumers in this segment are being serviced
through our local cable operators.
Looking ahead, I believe that FY 2022-23 will be a transformational year for your
Company. With the worst of the pandemic effect seemingly behind us, and sports and other
live entertainment events fully back in action, the environment looks favourable for the
revival of the Cable
TV business sentiment. We are confident that the efforts we made to prepare our
platforms for making deeper inroads into the market will yield significant benefit in
terms of increased market share for us in the Cable TV segment, going forward. We remain
focussed, committed and motivated to playing a pivotal role in helping India's Media and
Entertainment industry bounce back, stronger than ever.
On this positive note, I would like to take the opportunity to thank all our people who
have been tirelessly working to ensure that our consumers continued to enjoy our services,
without any interruptions, through this extremely challenging year.
Most importantly, I would like to thank you, our shareholders, for your unwavering
trust, support, and confidence, which enables us to move assuredly forward in our quest
for building a bigger eco-system for sustained customer delight and sustainable long-term
business growth.
| Thank You, |
| Rajan Gupta |
| Managing Director |