Billionaire Filmmaker Manoj Punjabi Bets Big On The Small Screen

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The head of Jakarta-based MD Entertainment once considered free-to-air TV as passé—now it could be a lucrative game-changer for his film studio.

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Indonesian Billionaire filmmaker Manoj Punjabi doesn’t sound upbeat about his recent acquisition–a local free-to-air television channel with a minuscule 1.4%market share by audience and years of losses. “Honestly I am acquiring a sinking ship,” the president director of MD Entertainment says in an interview in his lavish Jakarta office in October, just hours after inking a deal to buy a majority stake in the station’s parent company. With viewers worldwide switching to streaming platforms such as Netflix, free-to-air TV was, he once considered, a “sunset industry”—and to top it off, he acquired one of the industry’s weakest players in Indonesia.

But the 52-year-old has no regrets about his decision to spend 1.65 trillion rupiah ($105 million) on an 80% stake in Jakarta-based Net Visi Media (now called MDTV Media Technologies), which operates NET. TV channel through a subsidiary. “If I can turn it around, it will be an extraordinary satisfaction,” he says.

Punjabi knows something about satisfying audiences in the Indonesian entertainment business. A horror movie he produced and released in 2022, KKN di Desa Penari (translated as KKN, Curse of the Dancing Village), set a record in Indonesia, attracting 10 million cinema-goers—it’s the highest grossing film among company productions that boosted theater revenues battered by Covid-19 restrictions.

His plan is simple. MD Entertainment already has a substantial portfolio of over 14,000 hours of company-owned content. With NET., he gains another distribution platform to reach the nearly 100 million Indonesians who watch free-to-air TV, according to Nielsen Media Indonesia. In Indonesia’s sprawling archipelago of over 17,000 islands, some locations lack cinemas or internet, but can receive a TV signal.

The move is also meant to enhance the company’s strength in content creation, giving it another medium for which it can produce content, to be integrated with shows made for cinemas, digital TV and over-the-top (OTT) services. As Punjabi sees it, NET. is a game-changer. “TV is small money now. But TV could account for 50% to 70% [of total revenue], while cinema could account for the rest. It doesn’t mean revenue from cinema is going down, but TV is starting to generate revenue. That’s my plan,” he says.

Punjabi first shopped for a TV station in 2012, but couldn’t strike a deal. For a time, he dropped the pursuit, thinking free-to-air TV perhaps wasn’t a workable ticket for business expansion. Then came the opportunity to buy Net Visi Media, owned by two companies controlled by Agus Lasmono, whose late father, Sudwikatmono, a cousin of Indonesia’s second president Suharto, had for years dominated the cinema business.

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REEL RESULTS

For now, movies account for nearly 75% of MD Entertainment’s revenue.

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“TV could account for 50% to 70% [of total revenue], while cinema could account for the rest.”

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Free-to-air TV in Indonesia gets ad revenue mainly from makers of consumer goods such as shampoos, sodas and snacks, eager to reach a mass audience. In 2023, the total combined ad revenue of Indonesia’s publicly listed TV broadcasters was around 15 trillion rupiah ($1 billion). And for MD Entertainment, that market has been basically untapped until now. “[NET.] is my stepping stone to the big universe I’m creating for MD,” Punjabi says. Next up comes the hard work of realizing his strategy, and even as he tries to do so, he must also deal with new competitors as well as long-time rivals that are beefing up with deep-pocketed partners.

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CLEARER PICTURE

In 2023, Net Visi Media’s revenue was a fraction of listed rivals.

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Film production is a family business. Punjabi is the only son of Dhamoo Punjabi, who together with his younger brothers Gobind and Ram and a fourth partner, started a company called Panorama Film to import films into Indonesia in the 1960s and later produce them. In 1989 they began selling TV programming and a year later launched Tripar Multivision Plus (better known as MVP) to produce Indonesian soap operas called sinetron, which quickly found a home with new privately owned TV stations hungry for content.

Manoj Punjabi has always loved films. He began collecting movie posters at age 7, and by 10 was a fervent fan who went to his father’s office after school to watch movies, only stopping “when my dad asked me to go home and do my homework,” he says. “Since childhood, I wanted to be a filmmaker.”

It didn’t happen as quickly as he hoped. Punjabi finished a bachelor’s degree in marketing and finance in 1993, only to be compelled to find a job outside the film industry, which had been hard hit by an economic downturn. He got work at a pulp and paper company, but that didn't excite him, and when his three months’ probation period ended, the company said his services were no longer needed. Next he teamed up with a partner in a garment business, where he oversaw factory operations and marketing. But he didn’t stay long, jumping at a chance in 1995 to join MVP.

Punjabi said he had no privilege nor priority as a family member. Rather than start right off helping produce content, he initially was assigned to sell company-made sinetron in laser-disk format, which didn’t make much money, but paved the way for him to eventually become a production manager.

In 2002, after seven years at MVP, differences emerged among family members. Punjabi and his father sold their shares using the proceeds as seed capital to start a rival company called MD Media (a precursor of MD Entertainment) with Punjabi's wife Shania and mother Sunita both pitching in. To this day, the companies owned by the two branches of the Punjabi family still compete.

MD started off making the soap operas that were by then a staple of Indonesian TV, selling its first series to the Indosiar channel in 2003. Four years later, the company expanded to movies with a thriller titled Kala (Dead Time), but it didn’t thrill audiences, drawing only 70,000 viewers. MD's 2008 release of a movie about polygamy, Ayat-Ayat Cinta (Verses of Love), was a turning point. It attracted 3.7 million viewers, surpassing the number who went to see the Hollywood blockbuster Titanic in Indonesia. Notably, it proved to Punjabi that Indonesian movies could compete with global hits if they told a good story and were a quality production.

Hollywood movies had long-dominated the box-office. A small chance of success in drawing big audiences, coupled with tight competition and low ticket prices (about 15,000 rupiah or $1 per ticket), had discouraged Indonesian film producers. In 2015, when MD Entertainment scored the single highest-grossing film in the country, Surga yang Tak Dirindukan (The Heaven None Missed), only about 15% of Indonesian movie-goers were seeing locally made films.

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“Since childhood, I wanted to be a filmmaker.”

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Audience numbers began to creep up, and by 2019, 35% of cinema-goers were watching Indonesian-made films. That skyrocketed to nearly 60% in 2022, the year Punjabi’s horror hit drew a record audience, and in the first ten months of 2024, it's up to 67%, according to data researcher Cinepoint—with MD Entertainment holding the largest share, with 21% of the total seeing its films.

Competition among film producers is certain to intensify. In September, Media Nusantara Citra, owned by billionaire media mogul Hary Tanoesoedibjo (who has one of the most-watched free-to-air stations, MNC TV), bought 9% of MVP, allying one of the country’s largest and most aggressive media companies with Punjabi’s uncles. That was followed by competitor Verona Indah Pictures raising 340 billion rupiah through an IPO in October, giving it significant resources to strengthen its production of TV content and launch a filmmaking unit as well.

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CINEMA KING

Indonesian movies, where MD Entertainment holds sway, now dominate the country’s entertainment landscape.

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Despite the challenges ahead for Punjabi, he still has the confidence of Miming Satyono, president director of Samuel International investment company, which helped finance the purchase of Net Visi Media and now has a 1.7% stake in MD Entertainment. Punjabi “is very passionate, very focused,” she says. “I joined with him because I saw he runs his business very well and he is not a typical investor who hits and runs.” Farras Farhan, an analyst at Samuel Sekuritas Indonesia, projects MD Entertainment should be able to more than double estimated 2024 revenue of 490 billion rupiah to a projected 990 billion rupiah in 2025, calling Net Visi Media an attractive acquisition that gives MD Entertainment a shot at venturing into the lucrative OTT business.

And Punjabi has his own powerful ally to help him meet his goals. Chinese tech giant Tencent Holdings bought nearly 15% of MD Entertainment in 2021, three years after the firm became the first film producer to list on the Indonesian Stock Exchange in 2018 (Tencent has since sold down to 11.5%). Meanwhile Punjabi’s stake in the company is the main source of his estimated net worth of $1.5 billion, putting him at No. 34 on this year’s Indonesia’s 50 Richest list.

Among Punjabi’s priorities at the newly rebranded MDTV Media Technologies is shoring up the bottom line. In 2023, it had a net loss of 630 billion rupiah on top of a 181 billion rupiah loss the previous year. Ezaridho Ibnutama, chief economist at NH Korindo Sekuritas Indonesia says by text that after NET.’s operation “has been restructured or reformatted to be more aggressive, [MD Entertainment’s] 2026 revenue should experience near double-digit growth.” In Ibnutama’s view, putting MD’s content on NET. will make it more competitive, boosting its audience and advertising revenue “because the content from MD has been designed to cater to local preferences in entertainment.”

Punjabi remains personally involved in the creative process. He prefers to hear elevator pitches for new content kept to under two minutes rather than wading through an entire script. He also wants to keep Indonesian eyeballs glued to local fare, and not be wooed away by blockbusters churned out by Hollywood.

“There is a saying that content is king,” Punjabi notes. “What’s the point of content being king if we don’t have our own kingdom? Now I have my own kingdom.”