The Indian arm of Spotify rival Saavn saw its revenues jump to 459m Rupees (45.9 crore / $6.8m) in calendar 2017.
That was up approxiately 16% on 2016, while annual post-tax profits at the company tripled in the period, up to 32.2m Rupees ($476k) last year from 10.8m Rupees in the prior year.
These numbers, revealed in local company filings, refer exclusively to Saavn’s Indian operation and don’t reflect its US-based entity – but, according to data from App Annie, around 90% of users of Saavn’s app are based in India.
In July last year, Saavn announced that it expected to be profitable worldwide by the end of 2018.
At that point, it said it had 22m monthly active users and had quadrupled revenue since 2014 (without giving a monetary revenue figure away).
In March this year, Saavn announced that it was merging with rival service JioMusic, in a deal which valued the newly-combined platform at over $1bn.
The move was masterminded by Reliance Industries Limited (RIL) – one of India’s largest private corporations which boasts an annual turnover of more than $50bn.
As part of the deal, RIL has acquired a partial stake in Saavn for $104m.
The firm said that the merger valued JioMusic at $670m – suggesting that Saavn itself was valued at $330m+.
MBW understands that Spotify is planning to launch in India later this summer.
Founded in 2007, Saavn offers 36 million tracks in 15 languages.
The service offers both an ad-supported and Premium (‘Saavn Pro’) tier in India, and the premium service in many more markets worldwide.Music Business Worldwide
