Two roads diverged in a wood, and
I took the one less travelled by, and that has made all the difference.
—Robert Frost

Dear friends,

I have great pleasure in writing this letter to all of you and would like to share with you, your company’s progress last year. Time indeed flies and we have come to the end of yet another fiscal – A year that saw us forging ahead steadily in five streams of Entertainment – Studio, Media, Themed, Sports and Web.

A decade ago, the company decided to venture into graphics & animation – it was a humble beginning, a team with 5 members making interactive CD-ROMs. Today, our movie Alibaba has been nominated for a selection to the prestigious Academy Awards (the Oscars) in the USA, which is another feather in our cap, another first for the Pentamedia Family. We decided to try something different and we are reaping the dividends.

Two of our other movies – ‘Buddha’ and ‘Gulliver’s Travels’ are in various stages of production and the next fiscal will see these movies being released. Our Visual Effects division continues to work closely with the Indian film industry on various feature films. Our Media division has released Whistle, a live action film, while our Sports Complex is ready in Mayajaal-our theme park. Our Web casting portal Numtv is continually adding new content for its viewers and is also gearing up to offer ASP services and E-Learning on its site. The company is also developing content for the incubated TV channel - Splash, India’s first 24-hour kids channel in English.

During the last 2 years, the whole world has been reeling under the impact of various unforeseen events and situations, which have depressed everything right from masses to markets and finance to fitness!

In view of the disturbed environmental conditions worldwide, we have decided to take up all our productions/co-productions with a definitive period of completion and release, for an effective cash-flow system.

We are trying to simulate and emulate companies like Walt Disney, Pixar, AOL Time Warner etc in producing content using technology as a tool and have produced six animation films in the last six years, which I feel is a unique record.

The financial model, mainly equity of the above international companies, are 40 to 150 times our existing equity of Rs.250 crores. This has made us to study their content process and also the debt/equity model.

To reduce the high cost debt already incurred we have to increase the equity and reduce debt to have a higher level of comfort. We will drive our restructuring through demerging our various businesses in various streams of entertainment to enable each of these entities to have a clear focus, make their own strategic investments and alliances with business partners.

We are confident that with the continued dynamic restructuring of our businesses/products and resources, and investor support, we will be able to reach our goals in the digital entertainment world!

We are ready to take on the challenges in the forthcoming year and hope that it brings a lot of exciting business opportunities our way!

I would like to take this opportunity to thank all of you, our stakeholders, for your co-operation and support at all times.

Dr. V. Chandrasekaran
Chairman & CEO