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Commerce Ministry calls for a concrete plan to boost M&E exports to $10 billion in the coming five years
Dec 06, 2018

Acknowledging the growth potential of the Indian media and entertainment (M&E) sector, Mr. Sudhanshu Pandey, Additional Secretary, Ministry of Commerce and Industry, Government of India, has called for a concrete plan to increase exports from the sector to $10 billion in the coming five years.

Speaking at the 7th edition of the CII Big Picture Summit in New Delhi on Wednesday, the Additional Secretary said, "As one of the Champion Sectors supported by the Government of India, the Indian media and entertainment industry has a huge room for growth and should target a potential export growth of $10 billion from the current $1 billion." 

Spelling out India's contribution in the $2 trillion global media and entertainment space is around $25 billion, Mr. Pandey encouraged the M&E industry "to reflect" and chalk out a substantial plan to achieve this growth.

"We need to reflect on how do we grow our export pie of the audio visual sector from $1 billion (from the total Indian exports of $200 billion) to $10 billion in the next few years," he said. Currently, India is ranked fourth in the global audio visual exports in the world.

Mr. Pandey also emphasised the importance of Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs), which is key to the growth of M&E sector. He cited the example of the US, where the IPR industry contributes $6 trillion (38% of total GDP) to the economy. The Additional Secretary advised that the Indian M&E industry needs to drive IPR intensive industry, as this would safeguard against infringement of originality and creativity of the makers, thereby giving them the due credit.

Mr. S K Gupta, Secretary, Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI), stated that business models were changing in convergence and the new 5G network technology would rapidly change the way we access content in the next five years.  "There has been a dramatic change in the M&E industry in terms of development of both devices and the ecosystem. Everything is getting smart from TV to phones to many other devices.This is modifying how we consume content," said Mr Gupta.

India currently has 400 million quality Internet connections with digital media growing at 22% as compared to the 9% growth of traditional media. Mr. Gupta said that Indians on an average consume 9 GB of data/month compared to 3.1 GB/month in USA.

Mr. Shashi Shekhar Vempati, CEO, Prasar Bharati, said the transformation brought about through digitisation of traditional broadcasting would have impact at three different levels: the consumer, distributor and regulator levels. “The consumers are definitely fast catching up in this changing scenario by embracing technology to a great extent. Also, innovations have started at a steady pace. But the regulatory environment is still lagging in terms of establishing new policies, thus needs to fast catch up,” Mr. Vempati said.

Themed 'Changing Media Landscape: From Convergence to Transformation', the 7th edition of the CII Big Picture Summit has for the first time brought all M&E stakeholders from the Government of India -- Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI), Ministry of Commence & Industry, Ministry of Information & Broadcasting and National Broadcaster Prasar Bharti -- on one platform.

The BCG-CII report, “One Consumer, Many Interactions: Indian Media Houses of the Future”, was also released at the event. The report recommends that media houses need to reorganise their traditional organisational structures, reskill current workforce and lay down new standards for overall employee value proposition in order to retain talent in this new era of digitization of knowledge dissemination. The report also predicted that with merging of information technology and traditional broadcasting 7 to 8 lakh jobs will be created by 2023.

Mr. Sudhanshu Vats, Chairman CII National Committee on Media & Entertainment and Group CEO & Managing Director Viacom 18 Media Pvt Ltd, said that consolidation and convergence of the sector would lead to proliferation of small media-tech companies. He highlighted the challenge of a "moral dilemma" that will emerge from the convergence of ICT, which has to be addressed due to a changing and a more demanding consumer behavior where one needs to "draw a line between personalisation and privacy".

Mr. Rajiv Aggarwal, Joint Secretary, DIPP, MoCI assured the industry that the Government of India will provide an enabling environment so that both the communication and information and technology sectors can grow in convergence.

Mr. Vikram Sahay, Joint Secretary, Ministry of Information & Broadcasting, said the ministry is working on a new policy framework in the changing media landscape and will be announced shortly.

Chandrajit Banerjee, Director General, Confederation of Indian Industry said "The M&E growth is predominantly being fuelled by the digital segment with increasing consumption of content over the mobile Internet. Embracing Artificial Intelligence and Block-chain as new operating system will create a new wave of smart business strategies and modules for the Indian Media & Entertainment sector”.

6 December 2018

New Delhi

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