Press Release

Star India restructures business; ups Uday Shankar to chairman’s role

13 April 2016

MUMBAI: With an eye on the next phase of growth and profitability, India's largest broadcaster, Star India has restructured its business into five sub business units (SBUs) with different CEOs heading each of the units. In a realignment of roles, Uday Shankar, who has spearheaded the Star business in India as CEO for the last 10 years, will take up the role of chairman and CEO, while Sanjay Gupta, currently the chief operating officer (COO) has been elevated as the company's managing director. Asianet's managing director K Madhavan will now oversee all the south business as MD - South. In the new business structure, the entertainment unit will be headed by Amit Chopra as CEO with a mandate to lead the general entertainment and movie channels across Hindi, English, Bengali and Marathi clusters. Two senior Star executives, Nitin Kukreja and Ajit Mohan will continue to head sports and digital businesses respectively having been elevated as chief executives of their respective verticals. Vijay Singh, meanwhile, will continue to lead the motion pictures business as CEO of Fox Star Studios. All the four CEOs will report to the Gupta. In another leadership movement, Kevin Vaz, who was heading Hindi and Bengali clusters, has been made CEO - South reporting to Madhavan. Both Gupta and Madhavan will continue to report to Shankar. 

The company will also set up a pan India content studio under Gaurav Banerjee, who will report to Gupta. The announcement was made internally to Star India employees on Wednesday in a town hall meeting where all the 138 offices of the company were linked via video conferencing. 

(Source: economictimes.indiatimes.com)

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