Zee Entertainment has come out with its Q3FY07 result. The company's net profit in the third quarter was at Rs 95.8 crore. Its Q3 revenue ( consolidated) was Rs 417.7 crore.

Subhash Chandra, Chairman of the company says that subscription revenues are up 50% (YoY).

He informs that the DTH revenues contributed Rs 15 crore in the past quarter.

He also says that additional revenues will begin to come in from digitisation of their cable business.

Excerpts from CNBC-TV18's exclusive interview with Subhash Chandra:

Q: Can you take us through the main highlights of your performance of this quarter?

A: If you want to have comparable numbers, we have given that without the subscription income, the distribution business and without the news and regional channel businesses. If you look at the earlier consolidated numbers, which we have given as against Rs 2.7-2.8 billion topline, it is 4.177, which is 53% growth.

 The expenditure is also up by about 25%, this is what we need to control going forward. PBT is 1.375 billion as against comparable 427, which is 221.8% higher

Q: Advertising revenues have been very good, but are you expecting ad revenues to grow at this kind of a pace in the current quarter as well?

A: You cant say that it will continue at this kind of pace or not because Q3 is a festival quarter in the advertising parlour but still I can assure you that we will give in Q4 higher performance percentage than the market growth of advertising revenues.

Q: How much of revenues have come in on the topline on account of this 50% stake in Ten Sports and was there any sort of tax provisioning that you saw on account of the demerger of both your entities?

A: No, I think Ten Sports has a very small topline, both subscription and advertising revenues are about Rs 180 million which is Rs 18 crore as against Rs 417 crore, which is very small number. On tax point, there is no tax saving because of restructuring.

Q: Can you just take us through the subscription revenues you have garnered for this particular quarter because what importantly, you have started distributing your services via Tata Sky now.

A: I do not have the break up but we have 50% growth on QoQ as in previous year quarter and this year but only from the DTH business where we have got about 150 million in this quarter and 90 million on account of Ten Sports and there are additional revenues which will start coming in now. It has not yet reflected in this quarter, on account of the digitization of the cable.

Q5: How much of an enhancement do you see coming in because of CAS being rolled out in certain areas in the metros and particularly DTH operations also picking steam?

A: From Mumbai, Delhi and Kolkata, Zee bouquet was getting paid only for about 100,000 subscribers. Now currently WWIL, which is another group company, has already yielded 300,000 boxes. So 600,000 boxes have gone and I am definitely assuming that out of 600,000, 50% will adopt for entire Zee bouquet. So we will see three times growth in these areas only.

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