Bharti Airtel has officially called off discussions with the Tata Group regarding a potential merger of their Direct-To-Home (DTH) businesses. The telecom giant, through a regulatory filing said that both parties have mutually decided to terminate the discussions after failing to arrive at a “satisfactory resolution.”Tata and Bharti groups were finalising the merger between their loss-making DTH businesses, Tata Play and Airtel Digital TV, respectively, in February.
The merger as supposed to take place through a share swap and would have helped bump up Airtel’s non-mobile revenues through convergence.
Airtel was expected to own a majority stake of over 50% in the merged entity, as per an ET report from earlier this year.
Tata Play, India’s largest DTH player, was originally Tata Sky and began as a JV with Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. The Walt Disney Co took over that stake when it acquired Murdoch’s 21st Century Fox six years ago.
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A potential deal would have marked the second major transaction in the DTH space in about a decade following the Dish TV-Videocon d2H merger in 2016. It would also have coincided with Reliance Industries and Walt Disney merging Star India and Viacom18 to form JioStar, India’s largest media and entertainment company.
On the other hand, Airtel Digital TV is housed in Bharti Telemedia Ltd, which in turn is a wholly owned arm of the listed flagship Bharti Airtel.
Both DTH operations were being valued more or less equally at around Rs 6,000-7,000 crore as per the ET news report.
Tata Sons, the holding company of the diversified conglomerate, owns 70% of Tata Play, having bought out Singapore investment firm Temasek Holding Pte’s 10% stake in April 2024 for Rs 835 crore ($100 million), valuing the company at $1 billion, down a third from its $3 billion pre-pandemic valuation.
Source: Economic Times