Saregama India Ltd on Friday announced a strategic alliance with global player MGM Studios for marketing modern Hollywood films in the Indian market.
Announcing the tie-up, Sanjiv Goenka, vice chairman of Saregama India, said the company would launch at least 100 MGM titles in the rapidly growing domestic video market over the next year.
The tie-up gives Saregama access to MGM's video library, which is considered the world's largest collection of film title, including 15 winners of Oscar for best films.
Saregama's new alliance comes after similar tie-ups with other Hollywood majors like Universal, Warner Bros and Paramount, which have given the company almost a monopoly in the international films segment, he said, adding that this would also help Saregama in further strengthening its marketshare in the video business.
Goenka said that Saregama has plans of innovative marketing of Hollywood classics and this also included releasing the dubbed version in three languages -- Hindi, Tamil and Telugu.
He said there would also be special collectors' edition sets of James Bond films among other marketing initiatives such as value and box sets.
The MGM movie library includes such notable titles as The Great Escape, Platoon, Rain Man, The Great Train Robbery, Dances With Wolves, Westside Story, as well as
such notable franchisee as the 20 James Bond films, the Pink Panther series, the Rocky series and 19 films by Woody Allen.
Emphasising that home video was going to play an important role in the future entertainment market, Goenka said the share of home video was steadily growing over the years.
Home video has contributed only 3.33 per cent to the Saregama's income in 2002-03 and this has now gone beyond 17 per cent in the current year, he said.
Speaking about Saregama's financial performance in the current fiscal he said that the results of the third quarter ended December 2004 confirmed that the uptrend in the business was continuing.
The profit in the third quarter touched Rs 2.12 crore (Rs 21.2 million) as compared to Rs 1.30 crore (Rs 13 million) in the second and Rs 85 lakh (Rs 8.5 million)in the first quarter of 2004-05.
