Abcl To Close Down Bangalore, Hyderabad Offices

The Rs 61-crore Amitabh Bachchan Corporation Ltd, (ABCL), is slashing number of employees, closing down offices in Bangalore and Hyderabad in a bid to wriggle out of the liquidity crunch it is facing.

About 65 to 70 employees of the company have been asked to leave by the Corporation in the last three weeks.

Confirming this, sources close to ABCL said unproductive employees have been asked to submit their resignations. "Following this most of the employees tendered their resignations. Others have been served termination notices," a source said. ABCL has also shut down its Bangalore and Hyderabad offices.

The Chennai office has been upgraded to the status of the head office of the southern region. "However, the functions of the Hyderabad and Chennai offices will be carried out by the employees in the Chennai office," the source added.

 

After being plagued with persistent cash problems, the company is now trying to cut costs and thereby improve bottomline. Sources maintained that ABCL had no intention of exiting from any of its current businesses. Wherever possible, the Corporation plans to outsource. For example, the company plans to outsource a major portion of its activities like event management.

ABCL's current area of operations include film making, film distribution, selling music, event management, selling of commercial air time on TV channels, television production and managing the careers of actors. "ABCL will be looking at vendor development as a part of cost cutting measures," the source added.

In this regard, ABCL has already entered into a marketing and distribution tie up for all cassettes produced by ABCL with audio cassette Gulshan Kumar's T-Series.

Under the terms of the deal, the manufacturing, marketing and distribution of ABCL cassettes will be done by T -Series. It will be sold under the T-Series--Big B brand name. The latter is the ABCL brand name for its audio cassettes.

ABCL will get a minimum guarantee fee from T-Series on the cassettes sold.

The two companies will share the royalty on the sale of cassettes.

ABCL, will get a share of the royalty only after T-Series has recovered the guarantee fee paid by it.