The Tata Group is currently in talks to offer a repurchase of the stakes in its content distribution platform from Temasek Holdings Pte. The development comes in the midst of the Indian conglomerate delaying the Initial Public Offering (IPO) of Tata Play, as per multiple sources.
As per various media reports, Tata Group is considering whether to delay the Tata Play IPO analyzing the market situation. Instead, the Tata Group has started talks with Temasek regarding an agreement that would allow the Singapore-based investor to finally exit its long-term investment in Tata’s platform previously known as Tata Sky.
Temasek owns about 20 percent of the content distribution platform. Tata Play which is a joint venture between Tata Group and Walt Disney-20th Century Fox provides pay television via set-top boxes and over the top (OTT) video streaming through Tata Play mobile application. SEBI recently greenlit Tata Play for its IPO to be listed and would be first of Tata Group’s combined $128 billion to debut the market since Tata Consultancy Services in 2004 at $1.2 billion.
There are various speculations at the current stage regarding the deal, some say that Tata Group and Temasek would part ways whereas some believe that Tata Play IPO would soon hit the markets. Tata Play filed for IPO last year with SEBI and became the first company to go for filing IPO documents without making sensitive internal information public. Tata Play was incorporated in 2001 and expands beyond pay television and PVR services with Tata Play Binge, which is a OTT platform available on Amazon Fire TV stick, Tata Play Binge smart set top box, Android TV and dedicated mobile application and has a pan-India footprint of 23 million connections.
