New Delhi, March 23 :
New Delhi, March 23:
India's biggest entertainers and impresarios will meet in Mumbai next week for a two-day brainstorming conference that will seek to give shape to an industry besieged by the underworld even as investors forecast phenomenal growth in the sector over the next five years.
Amitabh Bachchan and Shah Rukh Khan, Sushma Swaraj and Pramod Mahajan will be joined by producers, distributors, film guarantors, content providers and event managers from home and abroad at FRAMES 2001, hosted by the Federation Of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI), the apex chamber that lobbied hard and got for entertainment companies the industry status they were seeking.
FRAMES - an acronym for Films, Radio, Audio-Visual, Music, Exhibitions and Shows - will bring to the country personalities like Richard Soames of Film Finance Company, which provides producers guarantees of completing a film. Soames' operations are mostly in the US and the UK. He has so far fought shy of India, despite Bollywood being the largest single film industry in the world in terms of output, because it is unregulated.
A study by Arthur Andersen, commissioned by FICCI, which will be released at the inaugural of FRAMES, has 'conservatively estimated' that the industry will grow from about Rs 96 billion now to about Rs 286 billion by 2005. This is bad news for the print media because, says Arthur Andersen, the growth of the entertainment industry will be boosted by advertisement revenues that will migrate from newspapers and magazines.
Internationally, the average share of the print media in the total advertising expenditure is about 45 per cent. In India, the share of print media in total advertising expenditure is as high as 55 per cent. This is expected to come down to international levels.
Within the entertainment industry, the films segment is estimated to grow from Rs 13 billion to Rs 40 billion; television broadcasting from Rs 30 billion to Rs 84 billion, cable television from Rs 24 billion to Rs 70 billion, television software from Rs 14 billion to Rs 54 billion, music from Rs 12.5 billion to Rs 19 billion, radio from Rs 0.8 billion to Rs 7 billion, live entertainment and event management from Rs 1.5 billion to Rs 11 billion.
'We are trying to professionalise the industry and this will drive out black money,' said Bobby Bedi, co-chairman of the conference. Bedi has been the producer of such films as Bandit Queen and Fire. 'We are telling both equity investors and debt investors that as an industry we are as bankable as any other. Given the background - people being arrested and interrogated (the reference is to the arrest of Bharat Shah and threats from the underworld) - this is an effort to bring clean money into the industry, ' he added.
The efforts gathered pace since the Industrial Development Bank of India, co-sponsor of FRAMES, recognised the industry. Bedi said about 10 entertainment companies have made IPOs (Initial Public Offerings) and about 20 more were in the pipeline. Some 300 additional screens in the multiplexes were slated to come up all over the country over the next two years. In the music business, piracy has come down from 80 per cent to 40 per cent.





