Received Two Bids For Acquiring Nearly Half Of Promoters’ Stake: Zee’s Punit Goenka
The decision, Goenka said, will be announced in a few days.
Zee Entertainment Enterprises Ltd.’s promoters, who are looking to pare debt, have received two bids for acquiring nearly half of their stake in the Subhash Chandra-led Essel Group’s flagship media company, Managing Director Punit Goenka told BloombergQuint.
“We have received two bids. One has submitted the binding sheet,” Goenka, who’s also the chief executive officer at the company, said. “We are speaking to the second bidder to convert the bid into a binding bid… both bidders are foreign entities and once binding term sheet is received from both bidders, the promoter family will evaluate them and take the final call.”
The decision, Goenka said, will be announced in a few days.
This comes when promoter debt has been a concern for investors as Essel Group had offered shares of Zee Entertainment as a collateral. The stock has tumbled 30.6 percent in the last 12 months and 23.5 percent so far this year. The group had struck a standstill agreement till September-end with lenders, primarily mutual funds, who agreed not to sell pledged shares till then even if the stock price falls further. The promoters, as per the agreement with the mutual fund and non-bank lenders, had to announce their plan to sell a 50 percent stake in Zee Entertainment by July.
Zee Q1 Performance
Zee Entertainment reported a better-than-expected quarterly profit on the back of growth in domestic broadcast and digital businesses.
Its net profit jumped 62.5 percent year-on-year to Rs 530 crore in the quarter ended June, according to its exchange filing. That beat the Rs 388-crore consensus estimate of analysts tracked by Bloomberg.
“We delivered another quarter of strong performance despite the operational challenges faced by the industry due to implementation of the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India’s tariff order,” Goenka had said in a statement accompanying the filing.