Business News

Anil Jayaraj, the CEO of sports at Viacom18, has called it quits after a near three-year stint. The development comes at a time when the Reliance Industries-backed company is in the midst of a merger with Walt Disney's Star India.Sources privy to the development said that the veteran media executive put in his papers on Monday.An email sent to Viacom18 seeking an official comment remained unanswered until the time of filing this report.As CEO, Jayaraj expanded Viacom18's sports business across TV and digital with platforms like Sports18 and JioCinema.During his stint, Viacom18 acquired marquee properties like the Indian Premier League (IPL) digital rights, the BCCI media rights, the Women's Premier League (WPL), and the Olympics 2024. Viacom18-owned JioCinema's free sports streaming disrupted the sports broadcasting segment and made digital the go-to medium for watching live sports in the country.Prior to Viacom18, Jayaraj was the ad sales head of Disney Star's sports network, Star Sports. Jayaraj has developed the monetisation plan for seven IPLs for Star Sports and Viacom18 combined. IPL is the single biggest media property in India both in terms of popularity and revenue.Before Star Sports, Jayaraj was chief marketing officer at Pidilite. In his career spanning almost 27 years, Jayaraj has also held top marketing positions at BP and Castrol.

After recording double-digit gains last week, defence stocks rallied up to 19% on Tuesday morning with Paras Defence and GRSE topping the list.The shares of Paras Defence zoomed 19% to hit a fresh 52-week high of Rs 1,373.80 on BSE amid a block deal of 3.29 lakh shares, while PSU defence stock GRSE was also trading around 12% higher. Mazagon Dock, Cochin Shipyard, and Astra Microwave were also trading around 5-8% higher.Shares of Tejas-maker Hindustan Aeronautics (HAL) surged 5.5% to its all-time high of Rs 5,484.20 on BSE after the Ministry of Defence issued a request for proposal to procure 156 Light Combat Helicopters from the PSU. The tender's value is said to be worth around Rs 50,000 crore, the largest single order given for acquisition of choppers to an Indian company.Defence stocks have been under investor radar after Defence Minister Rajnath Singh set a target to generate military exports worth Rs 50,000 crore on an annual basis and vowed to fast-track initiatives under 'Make in India' for defence production."Defence exports had touched a record Rs 21,083 crore in financial year 2023-24. It was historic. Our target will be to export over Rs 50,000 crore worth of defence equipment by 2028-2029," Singh had said after taking charge last week.According to earlier estimates by Nomura, the share of defence capex is set to increase to 37% of total budget in FY30 from 29% in FY25 estimates, which implies cumulative capital outlay of Rs 15.5 trillion over FY24-30 (vs cumulative FY18-24: Rs 7.8 trillion)."Our bottom-up analysis presents ordering opportunity worth $138 billion over FY24-32 for defence manufacturing and production," Nomura had said. The Japanese brokerage firm has been bullish on HAL and Bharat Electronics.