The man in the background: Meet NP Singh, CEO, Sony Pictures Networks India

Circa 1982, Khetri, Rajasthan: “You are always late; you have to come on time,” N P Singh chided a subordinate. The returning volley of Hindi expletives startled Singh, all of 22 then. He had begun working at the state-owned Hindustan Copper just a year back. That night he had trouble sleeping. “I realised that I had to earn respect, and not just for the title. That man was as old as my father and I would have never spoken to my father like this. It was a huge lesson that stayed with me,” he says. And on the eve of his departure in 1988, the same man asked Singh for a transfer because “I can’t work here without you”.

Now, 40 years later, the managing dire­c­tor and CEO of Sony continues to be known as a gentle, genial soul – a man with a twinkle in his eye and none of the aggre­ssion or machismo CEOs are known for.

Yet, Singh is the man behind what could become India’s largest media merger.

In December 2021, the Rs 5,900-crore Sony Pictures Networks India and the Rs 7,700-crore Zee Entertainment Enterprises announced their marriage. At Rs 14,000 crore in total revenue, Sony-Zee could become India’s second largest media firm after Disney-Star.

“The most important realisation (in recent years) was that we need to become a large network,” says Singh, 62. When the merger with Reliance-controlled Viacom18 fell through at an advanced stage in 2020, Singh took the idea of acquiring Zee to chairman and CEO Tony Vinciquerra and Ravi Ahuja, chairman of global television studios of Sony Pictures Entertainment, California. The men running the media arm of the $82.5-billion Sony Corp liked it. The deal was stitched even as allegations and counter-allegations were flying between Zee and its biggest investor, Invesco. Much of the PR and announcements were handled by the team at Zee. Singh remained, largely, in the background.

“Being quiet is a strength, otherwise I wouldn’t have survived,” says Singh, stretching his tall frame comfortably.

We are in his office in Malad, Mumbai on a sunny Wednesday afternoon. Singh doesn’t take anything, while I sip on hot wa­t­er and listen to the story of a man who rarely talks, and never about himself. So, this afternoon I insist that he takes me thro­ugh his journey from copper mining, to off­ice automation, to telecom and then to media.

Singh joined Hindustan Copper after a masters in commerce from Delhi School of Economics. Towards the end of 1988, he moved to Modi Xerox in Chandigarh and was recruited into president B K Modi’s office in Delhi as controller by 1993. Soon, he was part of the team setting up India’s first cellular phone service, Modi Telstra. “It was the most exciting phase of my career. I was on the board of Modi Telstra briefly, learnt so much, from human resources to managing joint venture partners to customer service,” he says. By 1999, when he was CFO of group firm Spice Telecom, “I felt that I had done what I had to at the Modi Group,” he says.

We move towards the Sony canteen. It has been cordoned off for lunch, ordered in from the neighbouring Westin. I tuck into the veg pulao and chicken curry. Singh goes for the same things, adding a piece of zafrani paneer tikka before we dive into his Sony years.

In June 1999, his quest for a new chal­lenge led him to join the (then) Rs 350-crore Sony Entertainment Television as chief financial officer. It was a much smaller company and a completely unknown industry. “When I joined, I told Sangeeta (my wife) that I am joining media even though I am a non-media person; let us try this for a year.” In fact, before moving to Mumbai, Singh paid the full year’s fee at Delhi Public School (Vasant Kunj) where his two sons were studying because he thought he would come back in a year. He didn’t. Singh is now in his 23rd year at Sony.

He turned out to be the perfect counterfoil to Kunal Dasgupta, Sony’s aggressive, ambitious and rather colourful CEO in those days. Singh talks with affection of his years with Dasgupta. Some of the best work the team at Sony did then was in combining the discipline of numbers with the creative part of the business. Television broadcasting was a sunrise business and much was unknown about pricing a show or a piece of sports. “We were always looking for out-of-the-box ideas. We were a challenger brand and therefore needed to be different and disrupt. (For example) we knew that we had to broad-base the audience for cricket. That is why we brought in Charu Sharma, Ruby Bhatia, Mandira Bedi. Some of those things worked, some didn’t,” he says. Sony’s efforts at making cricket a family show and its bid of more than $1 billion for the first Indian Premier League (IPL) in 2007 changed the economics of both cricket and broadcasting.

By 2004 Singh had become chief operating officer. But his moment was yet to come. When Dasgupta left in 2009, Manjit Singh came in as CEO for a few years before Singh finally took charge in 2014. He had been COO for over a decade. But the tag of “he is only a finance guy (and therefore risk-averse),” stayed on. Did it bother him? Singh shrugs.

“We have never shied away from taking risks,” he says. Sony was first out with an OTT in 2013, the acquisition of Ten Sports in 2016, experimenting with programming (Bhanwar, Jassi Jaissi Koi Nahin), genres (sports), channels (Max). He points to the talent Sony has helped discover, from Neha Kakkar in Indian idol to Kapil Sharma. Even its films – Piku (2015), Pad Man (2018) or the latest Looop Lapeta, among others – have pushed creative boundaries. Yet Sony remains “one of the most profitable ones in the business. Kunal was an outgoing personality and the face of the company; I keep to myself. I never went to film parties; I still don’t go, except for Mr (Amitabh) Bachchan’s Diwali party,” says Singh.

He heads for the phirni, while I stick with hot water. It’s time to ask him about the future. The rise of streaming and the growth of tech-media firms has changed both the nature of competition and the scale at which the business needs to operate. It is no longer about Star, Zee and Sony but about Google, Netflix and Facebook, too.  

“The way the business environment was evolving meant that we had to think of how to scale up. Standing still was not an option,” says Singh. In 2019, be brought in EY India for an exercise in charting Sony’s future. This led to the search for scale and eventually Zee.

Is this then Singh’s swan song? The rumours about his retirement have been flying around for some time now. Singh rubbishes them. He has every intention of staying on as a board member on the merged entity while Zee’s Punit Goenka will be CEO. He reckons,  “I have seen the worst and best phases of this company. The idea is to look back and say this is what we left behind for employees, viewers.”

Sony is at over 16 times the revenue it had when Singh joined. If the merger goes through, that figure will be 40 times. It is profitable and in good shape to take on the future. For a quiet man who avoids the limelight, that is not a bad place to be in.