Applause Entertainment to invest up to Rs 4,000 crore across verticals: Sameer Nair, CEO

MUMBAI: Kumar Mangalam Birla-owned content studio Applause Entertainment expects to invest up to Rs 4,000 crore in the next three to four years as part of a plan to expand across film, animation, factual entertainment, and gaming verticals.

“We are ready to back the right stories. So far, we have invested and reinvested close to Rs 400 crore in the last three years, and I anticipate this number to go up by 10X in the next 3-4 years,” Sameer Nair, CEO of Applause Entertainment, told ET. “It will be a mix of fresh and re-investment.”

Nair had joined Birla to launch Applause in August 2017.

“When we launched Applause, we anticipated the need gap for high quality premium drama. We followed a unique ‘hub and spoke’ model, where we did the entire heavy lifting, from identifying the right content to getting the right talent and investing. Three years on, it has sort of played out quite as per the plan,” Nair said.

Applause wants to take this model and expand it across new verticals.

“While we will continue to do series, we will add movies, infotainment, animation and gaming. That’s our expansion plan, while keeping our whole philosophy. We will work with people who want to do different things, and sort of co-invest or invest and expand this whole scope of thing,” said Nair, fresh off the success of ‘Scam 1992: The Harshad Mehta Story’.