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After our very own Richard Branson in Vijay Mallya, we may just have our very own Rupert Murdoch as well in Anil Ambani. Just over a couple of years after the famous split with elder brother Mukesh Ambani, Anil Ambani may have lost the race to become a trillionaire to his brother, but now he is looking all set to make it big in the media
world with ample number of strategic acquisitions and buying of stakes - either directly or through companies that he controls.

And this comes as no surprise as it is predicted that the Indian media and entertainment will be worth a whopping Rs. 800 billion by 2010 from the current figure of Rs. 437 billion.

The foray into this area began in 2005 when Anil Ambani acquired a 51% controlling stake in Adlabs, which was majorly into film processing and ran multiplexes. This stake was worth Rs. 350 crores. Today, the company has forayed into areas like film production and distribution. Quite recently, Hrithik Roshan became the country’s highest paid actor curtsey a Rs. 35 Crore 3-film deal with Adlabs. Director Vipul Shah too struck jackpot when he was signed for a ten-film 100 crore-rupee deal by Adlabs. Recent movies like "Namaste London" & "Nishabd" were produced by Adlabs, while there are many in the pipeline like Ram Gopal Verma’s "Sholay" and his sequel to the movie "Sarkar".

Further on, Adlabs bought a stake in quiz master Sidhharth Basu’s Synergy Communications (which made the very famous "Kaun Banega Crorepati" or KBC), thus, giving it a footing into television production and content.

Internet portals too caught Anil Ambani’s eye. He jumped onto the Internet bandwagon via the gaming portal "Zapak.com". Further, his company Zapak Entertainment added on features like e-mail to the gaming portal and then came in Zapak Mail which is being hugely advertised via TV, print and Internet advertisements these days as a 'simple n fast' e-mail service. Infact, recently Zapak Mail created a world record when over 1,15,000 users signed up for their e-mail service in a single day!

If that was not all, Zapak Entertainment decided to take on the hugely popular social networking site Orkut with the launch of its desi-version called Bigadda.com. Zapak is also all set to launch Gaming Cafes.

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* Contributed by: -
Shekhar Arya,
MBA 2nd Year,
Department of Management Studies,
Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee.