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MUMBAI:
Miditech is set for a major organisational restructuring as
it plans to aggressively expand its operations in India and
abroad.
For
starters, the content company will have business heads across
all its four existing and five new production centres.
First
among these is the appointment of Joseph T Joseph as the business
head for its headquarters in Delhi and senior VP - people
and structures. Joseph comes from CGH Earth, an international
chain of hotels, prior to which he had stints in production
and advertising.
The
company is also putting a corporate team in place. Soon it
will be announcing a chief financial and a chief technology
officer in its core structure.
"The
corporate team will help drive our expansion plans forward,"
says Miditech CEO Nikhil Alva.
Miditech
expects to produce 1000-1500 hours of programming this fiscal
and is ramping up its production team from 400 to 800 by the
end of 2007-2008.
To
beef up its output for regional markets, Miditech is looking
at expanding its production centres. Hyderabad, Chennai, Kolkata
as well as Indonesia and Malaysia are going to be added within
a year. "Our business is growing at over 250 per cent
annually. We are gearing up for this," says Alva.
Chennai
and Hyderabad production centres will be catering to the local
language channels. The task of the business heads in these
two cities will be to drive content deals as more regional
channels launch in these markets.
In Delhi, Miditech focuses on non-fiction and documentary
content, high-end kids programming like Galli Galli Sim
Sim for channels like Cartoon Network, Discovery, NGC,
BBC, NDTV and many other national and international channels.
Delhi is also home to Miditech's animation division.
The
company is in talks with Malaysia-based Astro for partnerships
in that region. Astro also has operations in Indonesia. "We
are in discussion with other players as well," says Alva.
As
part of the restructuring, Miditech is in the process of creating
HR structures and processes that are to be followed across
all the centres. Joseph will play a role in this while being
responsible for bringing on board and retaining key talent.
He will also help build training and evaluation systems for
the production teams.
"We
are putting the processes in place as we scale up," says
Alva.
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