LONDON, UK: ZOO Digital Group plc (AIM: ZOO) announced the expansion of its South Asia operations with the launch of ZOO India. The company has acquired the award-winning media services and localisation businesses of Vista India Digitek Private Limited and Vista Tanweer Studios Private Limited, based in Mumbai, together with a 35% investment in the aggregation services business Vista India Digital Media Inc., which is based in California, for a total consideration of $6.0m.
Of total, $3.1m is payable in cash on completion, $1m is being settled by way of the issue of 636,100 new ordinary shares of £0.01 each in the capital of ZOO on completion and the balance of $1.9m is to be paid as deferred consideration, with $1.3m payable 12 months from completion, $0.3m payable 24 months from completion and $0.3m payable 36 months from completion.
Established in 2012, Vista is a leading force in media localisation, media services and digital distribution for Indian and foreign language content. Vista provides end-to-end services across eight Indian languages and English, including dubbing, subtitling, artwork and metadata localisation services and a range of other media services.
It is an Apple approved aggregator and encoding house, a Netflix Preferred Fulfilment Partner (NPFP) and a Netflix Preferred Creative Agency. In both 2019 and 2020, Vista India was awarded the accolade of NPFP of the Year for the Asia-Pacific region.
For the 12 months ended 31 March 2021, $14k loss before tax was attributable to Vista. The aggregation business, which acquires the rights to Indian TV and Film assets for exploitation internationally, made a profit of $263k for the year ended 31 December 2020.
The acquisition and launch of ZOO India illustrate ZOO’s commitment to expand its end-to-end service offering in this growing market.
With India’s OTT (Over-The-Top) revenue predicted to grow from $1.9bn in 2021 to around $4.5bn by 2026, and the country’s SVOD (Subscription Video on Demand) subscribers expected to more than double by 2026 to 224 million, India is an important strategic focus for ZOO and its clients.
Vista has been a trusted vendor partner to ZOO since 2016 and its award-winning localisation teams already work within ZOO’s cloud-based technology ecosystem. The all-encompassing approach supports unrestricted creativity while enforcing high standards of production quality, workflow efficiency and content security across the entire global group.
Stuart Green, Chief Executive Officer of ZOO Digital, commented: “We are delighted to welcome Vista India and its teams to ZOO Digital Group. India has a vibrant film and TV industry, and the rapid adoption of streaming makes it a high growth and strategic market for ZOO’s clients. Following a year of unprecedented growth for both ZOO and Vista, this is the next step to further expand both companies’ servicing capacity to meet the needs of local and international content creators in 2022 and beyond.”
Rajiv Raghunathan, Managing Director, ZOO India / Vista said: “At Vista, our mission has always been to help content creators reach the largest audience possible. By joining ZOO Digital Group and deploying their world class technologies, we have even more opportunities to do this, both for international clients bringing content to Indian streaming services, and for local content creators to take their TV shows and movies to a global, multi-language audience.
“By having ready access to the technology and global talent pool of ZOO Digital, the partnership gives Vista a tremendous advantage in this marketplace, to immediately manage large volumes of subtitling and dubbing projects, across multiple languages.”
Suri Gopalan, Founder of Vista, added: “The world is seeing an unprecedented consumption of content that is crossing borders. This partnership will provide a flow of Indian content to the rest of the world and international content into India.”
The acquisition of Vista sees ZOO Digital Group continue its global expansion. This follows the launch of ZOO Turkey in November 2021 after a strategic investment in Istanbul-based ARES Media, and more recently the launch of ZOO Korea following an investment in Seoul-based media localisation specialist, WhatSub Pro. Further announcements are expected in 2022 as part of ZOO’s global growth initiative.
ZOO Digital supports major Hollywood studios and streaming services to globalise their content and reach audiences everywhere, by providing world-leading, technology-enabled localisation and media services.
Founded in 2001, ZOO Digital operates from hubs in Los Angeles, London, Dubai, Istanbul, Seoul and Mumbai with a development and production centre in Sheffield, UK. The company is targeting $100m sales in the medium term.
