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Big B Plans Corporate Comeback: The Financial Express
Mumbai, June 09: The Big B is back. And this time, he means business. Megastar Amitabh Bachchan, whose experiment with corporatisation floundered in the mid-nineties when his company Amitabh Bachchan Corporation Ltd (ABCL) went under, is now planning a well-thought-out corporate comeback through the company`s new avatar, AB Corp.
Mumbai, June 09: The Big B is back. And this time, he means business. Megastar Amitabh Bachchan, whose experiment with corporatisation floundered in the mid-nineties when his company Amitabh Bachchan Corporation Ltd (ABCL) went under, is now planning a well-thought-out corporate comeback through the company’s new avatar, AB Corp.
And even as he stands tall at 60 as one of Hindi cinema’s busiest actors, Mr Bachchan is clear that this corporate comeback will be slow and steady. No mistakes this time. And clearly wiser with the benefit of hindsight, he has decided that AB Corp will take one thing at a time. The company is coming back with film production, but even that will be by way of joint productions with large corporate groups, so that the risk and expertise are spread out. Joint production is the cornerstone of AB Corp’s new strategy. No distribution, television software or events for now.
“We’re going to move very slowly. We want to start with making films. We want to do it small, and we don’t want to do it alone. We want to go in for joint productions, holding hands with other bigger corporates. It could be the Tatas or the Birlas,” Mr Bachchan said in a detailed, freewheeling interview with FE, in between shots on the sets of the Tata Infomedia-produced Aitbaar, being directed by Vikram Bhatt.
The two immediate joint productions, he said, would be directed by Rakesh Mehra (who directed the supernatural thriller Aks) and Raj Kumar Santoshi, respectively, and would star both Mr Bachchan and his son Abhishek. “The idea behind joint productions is that we want to share responsibility, share production expertise, share corporate expertise. Rather than have 100 per cent of the property and make five per cent profit, we want to have 50 per cent or 30 per cent of the property and make 20 per cent profit,” he said, underscoring his intent to get the mathematics of the business right this time. On the possibility of an initial public offer (IPO) for AB Corp, Mr Bachchan said things were premature and at a very early planning stage.
Would any of these large business groups pick up equity in AB Corp? He said most of these “tributaries” of large corporate houses were themselves starting off in the business, and it, therefore, was unlikely that they would immediately pick up strategic stakes in AB Corp.
“From what I have gathered from my initial discussions with some of these corporates, I think they themselves are wanting to hold hands with people, because they are not truly acquainted with the industry and would require a greater learning graph or a greater learning period.” Making a distinction between investors and entities from the same business, he said: “Investors would come, but I don’t think that there are other people from the same business that are wanting to come in.” However, he said if there was an IPO by AB Corp, the company would be “open to the whole world.”
With the Bachchan brand now very much a global phenomenon, is there a possibility of a listing on the Nasdaq? While it clearly wasn’t ruled out, Mr Bachchan said the decision on such issues would have to be taken by the merchant bankers who would manage the IPO. “I know there are lots of opportunities overseas. People are interested in investing. But we’ll have to go and see that possibility. Once we decide on the IPO, maybe we’ll go to places like England and America and seek investments.” With the Bachchan brand even more valuable now than before, is there a plan to revalue it? Said Mr Bachchan:”It was valued at Rs 15 crore for me and Rs 3 crore for Jaya (his wife) and that formed our core corpus. That’s a ten-year contract, which will be over in 2005. That’s for the board to decide, and I don’t even know whether we want to go in for the same model or not.”
A huge success on the endorsements front these days, and clearly unwilling to talk about the large number of social awareness campaigns he does, Mr Bachchan said the earnings from his commercial endorsement contracts go to the bottomline of AB Corp.
Reminiscing on the ABCL experiment, he said he was told to let professionals manage the show, which he did. “I was told you leave things to the executives. You pass on the responsibility to them, and that’s it. They wanted independent authority, which I gave them. But maybe in hindsight, it required more monitoring and control.”
Does he regret the ABCL move? “No, no regrets. I think there’s a certain sense of pride that we brought about something new. With a certain amount of immodesty, I can say that several models that came in after that were definitely inspired or influenced or taken up from what we had envisaged. But obviously not having been able to work it out correctly is a regret. The fact that we did not allow it to sink, go bankrupt and carry on with our lives is something we’re happy about. We worked towards reviving it. We took it to BIFR which is one indicator that we wanted it to be alive,” he explained, making it clear he also wanted the company to come out of BIFR soon.
“Conscience has played a very large part in all this. My conscience would not allow me to keep creditors on, even if it is for one rupee that I owed them. There’s a sense of pride that we’ve been able to pay back the debts. We’re still not entirely, entirely debt free. There’s still one or two per cent left...a few court cases here and there, but we will definitely sort those out,” he said.
The two immediate joint productions, he said, would be directed by Rakesh Mehra (who directed the supernatural thriller Aks) and Raj Kumar Santoshi, respectively, and would star both Mr Bachchan and his son Abhishek. “The idea behind joint productions is that we want to share responsibility, share production expertise, share corporate expertise. Rather than have 100 per cent of the property and make five per cent profit, we want to have 50 per cent or 30 per cent of the property and make 20 per cent profit,” he said, underscoring his intent to get the mathematics of the business right this time. On the possibility of an initial public offer (IPO) for AB Corp, Mr Bachchan said things were premature and at a very early planning stage.
Would any of these large business groups pick up equity in AB Corp? He said most of these “tributaries” of large corporate houses were themselves starting off in the business, and it, therefore, was unlikely that they would immediately pick up strategic stakes in AB Corp.
“From what I have gathered from my initial discussions with some of these corporates, I think they themselves are wanting to hold hands with people, because they are not truly acquainted with the industry and would require a greater learning graph or a greater learning period.” Making a distinction between investors and entities from the same business, he said: “Investors would come, but I don’t think that there are other people from the same business that are wanting to come in.” However, he said if there was an IPO by AB Corp, the company would be “open to the whole world.”
With the Bachchan brand now very much a global phenomenon, is there a possibility of a listing on the Nasdaq? While it clearly wasn’t ruled out, Mr Bachchan said the decision on such issues would have to be taken by the merchant bankers who would manage the IPO. “I know there are lots of opportunities overseas. People are interested in investing. But we’ll have to go and see that possibility. Once we decide on the IPO, maybe we’ll go to places like England and America and seek investments.” With the Bachchan brand even more valuable now than before, is there a plan to revalue it? Said Mr Bachchan:”It was valued at Rs 15 crore for me and Rs 3 crore for Jaya (his wife) and that formed our core corpus. That’s a ten-year contract, which will be over in 2005. That’s for the board to decide, and I don’t even know whether we want to go in for the same model or not.”
A huge success on the endorsements front these days, and clearly unwilling to talk about the large number of social awareness campaigns he does, Mr Bachchan said the earnings from his commercial endorsement contracts go to the bottomline of AB Corp.
Reminiscing on the ABCL experiment, he said he was told to let professionals manage the show, which he did. “I was told you leave things to the executives. You pass on the responsibility to them, and that’s it. They wanted independent authority, which I gave them. But maybe in hindsight, it required more monitoring and control.”
Does he regret the ABCL move? “No, no regrets. I think there’s a certain sense of pride that we brought about something new. With a certain amount of immodesty, I can say that several models that came in after that were definitely inspired or influenced or taken up from what we had envisaged. But obviously not having been able to work it out correctly is a regret. The fact that we did not allow it to sink, go bankrupt and carry on with our lives is something we’re happy about. We worked towards reviving it. We took it to BIFR which is one indicator that we wanted it to be alive,” he explained, making it clear he also wanted the company to come out of BIFR soon.
“Conscience has played a very large part in all this. My conscience would not allow me to keep creditors on, even if it is for one rupee that I owed them. There’s a sense of pride that we’ve been able to pay back the debts. We’re still not entirely, entirely debt free. There’s still one or two per cent left...a few court cases here and there, but we will definitely sort those out,” he said.