Animation and visual effects company VenSat Tech Services is planning to establish studio presence in the United States, from where it derives 85 percent of its business, by the end of 2011. It would begin by shifting around half of its 150-strong team to the US.
“We are in talks with a dozen potential partners and will follow the inorganic route. It could be acquisition or something else,” said Venkatesh Roddam, executive director, VenSat, in an interaction with Business Standard.
On the company’s plans for listing, he said, “we will take a call in 2012.”
VenSat, which was incorporated in July 2009 and began operations in December 2009, expects a revenue of $10 million by March 2012, and a positive balance sheet a year later, he said. The company had received seed funding from Annapurna studios and Indo-US Venture Partners.
The company would go for co-production arrangements as an operational strategy.
“Today, the IT kind of offshoring is not going to work. All the deals that we are doing right now are for co-production rights. We charge a fee up to only 50 percent of the deal value and the rest is in terms of co-owning the intellectual property,” Venkatesh said.
IT-enabled services were vendor-based from 1980s to 2003. Then the companies were captive units while from the end of the last decade, it’s now participative, he said.
The company has set up a House of Imagination and Intelligence (Hi2), an R&D team of 10 people at its Chennai studio for better production and execution quality.
Venkatesh said it had no plans to create its own content. "For the next three years, we would focus on co-owning content. As part of this process of co-owning content, you are pretty much developing your own content," he said.
He said it was not looking to create content for the Indian market at the moment, but could come up with a separate domestic strategy in the next five to ten years. Currently, 2-d flash, visual effects and 2d-3d conversion accounts for 30 percent each, with 3-d content forming the rest.
He said the Indian animation industry benefitted from the IT eco-system.
“Now, the environment is very very positive. Earlier animation companies used to be proprietary units of studios but now they are emerging as mainline businesses.”
