Chinese phone maker Xiaomi buys stake in Hungama

NEW DELHI: Chinese companies are looking to grow their engagement with the Indian market. Xiaomi, the smartphone maker, is leading a $25 million (about 165.35 crore) funding in content provider Hungama Digital Media Entertainment, which also has ace investor Rakesh Jhunjhunwala on board.

The investment comes in as mobile broadband speed gets faster in India and 4G networks are rolled in many parts of the country.

The investment in Hungama is Xiaomi's first investment in an Indian company and it is open to more such opportunities, VP Hugo Barra said.

Hungama will help the company strengthen its local content and services portfolio in India. "Our Video on Demand (VoD) service in China has 100 million installs and 30 million daily active users. 4G has played a major role in this. India is now on the verge of witnessing a similar data explosion and we wanted to ensure that we have a big play in this segment," Barra said.

He added that through the investment in Hungama , Xiaomi will be able to integrate the latter's content into its own line of smartphones.

Hungama has partnerships with over 700 content creators, and has over 8,000 movies in Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Bengali, Punjabi and six other Indian regional languages on its platform. Over 65 million monthly active consumers access Hungama across platforms for its music, video and movie services, the company said.

The funding round also saw participation from existing investors Intel Capital, Bessemer Venture Partners and billionaire Rakesh Jhunjhunwala.

The funding round also saw participation from existing investors -- Intel Capital, Bessemer Venture Partners and Jhunjhunwala. "This will also help us grow together and deepen our understanding of the content sector in India. While we are still working on the exact roadmap, we will start integrating Hungama's content services into our platforms, which will also include themes and ringtones," Barra said. "With this investment, we intend to further strengthen our movie and TV services and in fact, Hungama Play will shortly add 1,500 hours of TV content in vernacular languages and English," said Neeraj Roy, founder and CEO of Hungama. Xiaomi had entered India in July 2014. It started local assembly of smartphones last year and currently, over 75 per cent of its smartphones sold in India are made locally.
Source: Chinese phone maker Xiaomi buys stake in Hungama