Though I understand buyback was done at higher price and promoters participated, many indian companies just syphon off funds from company… I get some respite that DB corp is actually distributing the cash…
The biggest discussion point here should be: will ad revenue come back close to previous levels (at least close to that level) once things come back to normal? Is there a possibility govt comes to rescue of print? Digital marketing is a storm. However, we should look at example of australia. They are making FB/Google pay for every click they get on google search or facebook on news articles of publishers. NY times also get very well valued when they got all their content paid.
Let me try to answer both these questions as I am fairly close to this industry:
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news paper advertising does work. For all the local businesses, education, retail or real estate, if you can’t go national on TV, digital or print is the way. This is the area where FB/Google are coming strongly but I don’t believe they can wipe out local advertising. Please remember in all the advanced countries, print died more because the readership of newspapers moved digital and not other way round. In India, newspaper readership is still very high as compared to those countries. This definitely a big plus for newspaper industry along with the fact that distribution cost and manufacturing cost is a very small fraction of what we see in advanced countries. Please note that in a country like Japan, print flyers are still a big medium to do advertising.
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India has already pushing back the digital players by putting digital tax on them to make them expensive. Sooner or later, all the countries will take cues from Australia as Fb/Goog pay very less tax locally and most of that is paid in ireland. Further, FB/Google are realizing that if they don’t support the publishers, they won’t get content and face wrath of government. Thus, I believe one way or another, there will be support to publishers and thus making models more economical.