Suresh Selvaraj moves from Asianet News Network

Suresh Selvaraj, CEO and executive director at ANNPL (Asianet News Network Private Limited), responsible for Suvarna News, Asianet News and Kannada Prabha, has moved on from the company. His last day at ANNPL was 2 March 2013. Selvaraj confirmed his exit to Campaign India.

Shyam Sundar, earlier CEO, Jupiter Media and Entertainment Ventures, the holding company of ANNPL, will be replacing Selvaraj and will be at the helm of affairs at ANNPL.

Selvaraj had joined ANNPL in February 2012. Prior to that, he was president, Outlook, where he had joined in 1998 as regional manager, South.

Speaking about his tenure at ANNPL, Selvaraj recalled that his short stint with ANNPL as an interesting one. According to him, he worked on changing the look and feel of the channel immediately after joining the group. The biggest achievement, according to him, was seamless shifting of channel’s studio.

He said, “I heard even the biggest of television networks lost at least two to three days of transmission during the shifting of the studios, but Suvarna News had had a near seamless transmission; we did not go off air even a single day during shifting of the studio.”

He further said that when he joined the channel the ad sales department was over-dependent on local advertisers which, according to him, sort of ‘downgraded’ the channel. “After I joined, I asked my team to bring more and more national advertisers on board following which the share of local ads went down. Of course, there was revenue and inventory loss but we were able to overcome all that. During this period the revenue increased 27 percent against the industry average of 7 percent,” he said.

Selvaraj is taking a break now and evaluating options. “After working for almost 33 years non-stop, I wanted to hit the pause button, take a chill pill and explore something I always wanted to but never got the time or opportunity to,” he added.

He started his career with The Times of India’s circulation department in 1980 as an executive and has worked with Deccan Herald and The Statesman in previous assignments.