Kasturi & Sons Ltd (KSL) has decided to demerge its flagship publishing business into a separate entity, bringing in a new structure to the whole entity. It has also announced the board level changes while the operational team continue to be the same.
According to sources in the company, the move is to bring the English publications that were under KSL to a separate subsidiary. With this, KSL will be a holding company under which there would be subsidiaries, including the new subsidiary of English publications comprising The Hindu newspaper, KSL Media that runs The Hindu Tamil, KSL Digital Ventures that runs a real estate portal Roof and Floor and Sporting Pastime India Ltd.
The idea behind the new structure is to bring focus into the publishing business specifically, said sources. There is no plan to bring in external investors into the business, they averred.
The company said Mukund Padmanabhan will continue to be the editor of The Hindu, while Rajiv C Lochan, who joined KSL from McKinsey & Company two years before, will continue to be KSL's MD & CEO of publishing business.
N Murali has been appointed as the chairman and Nalini Krishnan will act as the co-chairperson of the holding company, Kasturi & Sons Ltd. The existing directors of the pre-merged KSL constitute the Board of the holding company.
N Ram has been appointed as Chairman and Malini Parthasarathy as the co-chairperson of the Hindu Group's publishing company. Recently, Parthasarathy resigned from her post as an editor at The Hindu.
THG Publishing Pvt Ltd, whose board has been constituted with the existing directors of Kasturi & Sons Ltd and The Hindu Group's newspapers, magazines and digital news media publications, is now a part of this company.
N Ravi has been appointed the publisher of The Hindu and other publications of The Hindu Group. Until now Ram was the chairman and publisher of The Hindu.
Kasturi and Sons, the parent company of The Hindu newspaper, had been a stable and profitable media company. According to sources in the company revenue of the Group is estimated to be around Rs 1,200 crore.