Brands
Siyaram’s lost 25% of business during lockdown, expecting better festive season
NEW DELHI: Siyaram’s is looking forward to exploring marketing activities in the coming festive season, starting October, but with a new approach to the media mix, president Shreedhar Soni told Indiantelevision.com on the occasion of a virtual press meet, organised by the brand to announce its ‘Retail Mahakumbh’ initiative.
He shared, “Siyaram’s core marketing activities, as you would have noticed, are mostly centred around the wedding season and the festive season, starting October, which will commence normally as every year. Sure, we have missed our opportunity with the summer sales this year, but we will be sticking to our plans of making the brand popular going ahead. However, we will have a different approach to use the mediums. Greater focus will be moving towards digital marketing. TV and print part will also resume, as we are expecting the market to develop some normalcy by then.”
It is also planning to expand Siyaram’s online business, which currently stands at just 10 per cent. The upcoming ‘Retail Mahakumbh’ will be focussing, among many other things, on training the retailers to promote and sale their products using the digital medium.
VP marketing N Gangadhar added, “We will also be launching some new products in the coming months. As people get more conscious about what they wear and purchase post-coronavirus, we are planning to launch anti-viral and anti-microbial fabrics.”
The fabric is already ready and awaiting some approvals on its efficiency. It will be launched as soon as it gets clearance and the trade channels start moving again.
Additionally, the senior executive team of Siyaram’s also shed some light on how Covid2019 impacted the sector and their business during the lockdown.
President and ED Gaurav Poddar shared, “We were almost non-functional mid-March onwards. There was virtually no production for the past 2.5 months. We lost almost 25 per cent of our business in these months.”
However, he is positive that things will start getting better soon. “Around 150 of our retails shops have already opened in the green zone areas and they are recording somewhere around two-thirds of the normal sales number already, which I feel is not bad.”
He added while exports will take another quarter to get back to normal, the domestic sector will be quicker to improve as there is a lot of pent-up demand among the consumers.
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Brands
UK’s OnlyFans seeks US investor at $3bn valuation after owner’s death
The adult video platform is seeking stability after the death of its billionaire owner
LONDON: OnlyFans is looking for a new partner. The London-based adult video platform is in advanced talks to sell a minority stake of less than 20 per cent to Architect Capital, a San Francisco-based investment firm, in a deal that would value the business at more than $3bn (£2.2bn).
The move is driven by an urgent need for stability. Leonid Radvinsky, the Ukrainian-American billionaire who owned OnlyFans, died of cancer last month at the age of 43, leaving the future of one of Britain’s most profitable privately held businesses suddenly uncertain.
The choice of Architect Capital is not arbitrary. The firm has deep expertise in financial services, which aligns neatly with OnlyFans’ ambitions to offer banking products to its creators, many of whom have long struggled to access basic financial services because of the nature of their work.
The numbers behind OnlyFans are, by any measure, staggering. The platform posted revenues of $1.4bn in the year to 30th November 2024, with a pre-tax profit of $684m, up four per cent on the prior year. Payments to creators totalled $7.2bn over the same period, a rise of nearly ten per cent. Radvinsky personally collected $701m in dividends from the business in 2024 alone, on top of more than $1bn in such payments he had already received. The platform, run through its parent company Felix International, hosts 4.6m creator accounts, with performers keeping 80 per cent of subscription proceeds and the platform pocketing the remaining 20 per cent. It has 377m fan accounts in total.
The current minority stake talks represent a notable scaling back of ambitions. In January, OnlyFans was reported to be in discussions with Architect about selling a majority stake of 60 per cent. Before that, the company had explored a sale to a consortium led by Forest Road Company, a Los Angeles-based investment firm. Neither deal materialised.
OnlyFans has built an enormously lucrative business on content that mainstream finance has long refused to touch. Now, with its owner gone and a $3bn valuation on the table, it is looking for the kind of respectable institutional backing that might finally persuade the banks to take its calls.
