In the news again, British daily Financial Times eyes Indian market

In its latest coming, FT focuses to get new readers and revenues in India; has a pool of 1.8 million users

The Nikkei-owned Financial Times (FT) is making eyes at India, again.

Earlier this month saw the first Financial Times event in India in over 12 years. The FT Live Energy Transition Summit in New Delhi was attended by Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman among other heavyweights from the government and industry.

FT Professional (Pro), its enterprise brand which has been pushing subscriptions through corporate partnerships with Infosys, the Tata and Mahindra groups among others, now has a pool of 1.8 million users.

“That’s how many we are being paid for. Over 100,000 of those are reading us every day,” says Angela Mackay, managing director, Asia Pacific, global publisher FT Live and board director FT Group.

 

This is in addition to the estimated 13,000 odd direct subscribers it has in the country. (FT declined to give India-specific numbers). The company is hiring people in Delhi, Bengaluru and Mumbai “to help push engagement (time spent) with the new FT Pro subscribers,” says Mackay.

The £510 million, London-based newspaper company is a “paywall pioneer,” as Colin Morrison, founder of the UK-based media weekly Flashes & Flames puts it. In a world where newspapers are struggling with any kind of revenue or readership growth, 22 years after introducing a paywall, FT has a 2.8 million ‘global paying audience.’

That is people who subscribe either to the newspaper (1.4 million) or other brands under FT (1.4 million). These include FT Live (events) or publications like FundFire and Endpoints, a biopharma newsletter, among other products and services. It has along with The New York Times and a few other brands managed the transition to digital well. FT now gets half its revenues from digital subscriptions with the rest coming from advertising, events and other businesses. In 2007, it got 70 per cent of its revenues from print advertising. “We’ve been lucky and also strategic about the way we have relentlessly increased our subscription base particularly over the last decade with Nikkei’s support,” says Mackay. Japanese media major Nikkei paid £844 million to acquire FT in 2015.

Nikkei, which logged revenues of $2.45 billion in 2023 publishes the Nihon Keizai Shimbun among other brands. “B2B (business-to-business) subscription is one area that FT has cracked better than others. It is a significant way to distribute because at those prices (Rs 16,100 for the first year) they won’t get mass subscriptions,” says Parry Ravindranathan, CEO and co-founder Converj and former president and managing director, international, Bloomberg.

Even at lower prices, pay is a tough game in India. There are barely 2 million online subscribers to print in India after over a decade of attempts by publishers. The Rs 26,000 crore newspaper business remains ad-dependent. Note that streaming video has anywhere from 80-100 million subscribers – so the will and money exists. So does the need gap.

“Indian retail investors are increasingly participating in the global markets, so there is a growing appetite for global data and knowledge,” says Ravindranathan.

“Seventy per cent of the FT’s subscribers are outside the UK,” says Morrison.

That’s the number that India could add to. It is also part one of the India strategy.

“We were selling the newspaper in India from the 1920s and have had an editorial presence since the 50s. But we have really just come back over the last 18 months, thoughtfully and strategically. It coincides with the realisation that India is much more outward looking than it used to be,” says Mackay. That brings this to the second part of the strategy – advertising.

One estimate puts outbound advertising from India at $30 million (Rs 246 crore). This is the money spent by the central or state governments advertising for tenders, tourism, investment or by Indian companies with an overseas footprint. Much of it goes to brands such as CNN, The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, The Economist or FT. One analyst puts the FT’s takings at about $5-7 million (Rs 41 crore to Rs 57 crore).

The third part of the India game plan is events, consulting and its other products. For instance, a wholly- owned company called FT Strategies, advises other media companies. There is FT Corporate Ventures which takes small, strategic stakes in companies.

“It is no longer about a newspaper,” says Morrison.

Much of this diversification is the way forward, but brings its own issues. “FT’s performance has been very modest in many ways. At half a billion pounds, it is not very profitable (£30 million in operating profits in 2023). In the long run, things have to make money to survive,” says Morrison. A bulk of its profits still come from print, especially its popular weekend edition, say analysts.

FT has been lucky to get an investor like Nikkei. It is owned by employees since Japanese law does not allow newspaper firms to be publicly traded. If it did, the thinking might have been more short-term. For now, the expansion party continues.