Dear Shareholders,
We hope that your families and you are safe at this time. The Covid-19 pandemic burst
upon us over a year ago, changing forever our lives and the world as we know it. For your
Company, it has been a year of challenge, perseverance, commitment and an exemplary rising
to the occasion on every front that concerns us as "India's Most-Trusted News
Broadcaster", an award that your Company has won repeatedly. It is with incredible
pride that we share that this was a year during which NDTV shone, both with its
world-class journalism on the unprecedented pandemic, and with its financial performance.
Your Company has declared its best-ever result with a profit of Rs. 37.99 crores; for the
Group, the performance was its best in over a decade.
Your many messages on how our coverage was essential to daily life in India, to our
collective safety and our solidarity as a people inspired us everyday. Through long hours,
in which our teams performed as frontline workers, often at great risk to their own health
or to that of their families, we were guided by the steady and firm presence of your
support. We also want to express our admiration of, respect for and gratitude to each
member of Team NDTV for showing that being in service to journalism is more than a talking
point - it is in fact, what motivates and guides us everyday.
This has been borne out in the annual survey of the prestigious Reuters Institute at
Oxford University which showed that through the last year, more Indians watched NDTV 24x7
than any other English news channel, and our website, ndtv.com, was India's most-popular
source of online news. To be established as Number One in a year where credible and
accurate news was the overarching need is a badge of honour we wear with profound
gratitude to our vast online and television audiences.
The fact that NDTV is India's choice for fair and balanced news was reinforced in a
year that saw the ratings system collapse under the weight of corruption and bribery. The
blatant flaws of the measurement system which not just permitted but encouraged the buying
of ratings has been fully exposed and is now being investigated by different agencies.
NDTV has for years spoken about the urgent need to reform how TRPs are collected and
reported so that audiences and advertisers have a transparent and complete picture of what
India chooses to watch. Unlike so many other large news networks in India, your Company
has in no way ever been tainted by unfair practices to fix the ratings. We have always
placed our stock in our content alone-in ourjournalism.
Our digital business remains a market leader, recording its most-successful year ever
with a record high for revenue and profitability. During a year when television
advertising moved to digital, we were able to use our premium position to benefit greatly
from this seminal shift. We continue to invest in superb innovation and technology to
trigger digital growth as connectivity expands around India.
Through the many business challenges of an economic slowdown of immense proportions,
your Company acted quickly to curtail expenses and to allocate all available resources to
the need for countrywide coverage of the pandemic. The results of this financial prudence
hopefully make you very happy - the Company's market cap has grown from 164.08 crores to
363.94 crores over the last year.
The new year remains a formidable one - the economy has yet to recover to pre-pandemic
levels, and the prospect of a third wave concerns us all. Through this, Suparna Singh and
the entire Management team will continue to work on ensuring the health and safety of each
colleague, while also ensuring that we continue the path of economic recovery that the
Company embarked on three years ago, one on which it has registered considerable progress
already.
As ever, we rely on you as NDTV enters its 34w year. Please look after
yourselves.
With much gratitude,
| Radhika Roy and Prannoy Roy |
| (Executive Co-Chairpersons) |