The Disinvestment Minister Arun Shourie's privatization policies have resulted in the markets being flooded with IPOs over the past few months. The first quarter of 2004 saw a whole lot of offerings by the government to sell its stake in PSUs. Therefore, this time we at AdEx India decided to study the impact this had on Print Advertising in the first quarter of 2004. Let's look at the below table showing Top Categories on Print in the First Quarter of 2004.

Interestingly, the Public Issues category, ranks 11th on the Top Categories list on Print Advertising for the First Quarter (January-March 2004), which is pretty high.

Let's look at the Top Advertisers in this category during the above period.

The graph clearly shows the government's focus on divesting its stakes from Public Sector Companies belonging to the Petroleum, Oil and Gas Sectors. The Public Issue of Petronet LNG Ltd, a Joint Venture company formed by the Government of India and promoted by GAIL (India) Ltd (GAIL), Oil & Natural Gas Corporation Ltd (ONGC), Indian Oil Corporation Ltd (IOC) and Bharat Petroleum Corporation Ltd (BPCL) tops the chart accounting for nearly 14% of the spends on this category. The next six in the list, ONGC, GAIL, IPCL, IBP, Dredging Corporation and CMC were all offers from the Ministry of Disinvestment. Patni Computer Systems, Power Trading Corporation and Biocon Ltd complete the list.

Another interesting analysis would be to study the Corporate campaigns that some of these top advertisers ran during this period so that people had more faith in these companies and therefore would invest in them. Let's look at the ranking and share of advertising of these advertisers in the Corporate/Brand Image category. The below table illustrates this.

So, what would be the impact, if we do a bit of swapping around, i.e., deduct all the money spent by Public Issue on Corporate campaigns and add it to the Public Issues Category number considering these were basically aimed to evoke good responses from the Public. The following table shows that the Public Issues would jump to the fifth position on the Top Category Rankings.

One can thus safely conclude that Public Issues was one of the strongest categories on Print Advertising in the First Quarter of 2004. There has been a lot of debate whether the Government's decision to divest its stakes in these companies was correct or not, but as far as the Print Industry is concerned, no one is complaining!

(Analysis from AdEx India- A Division of TAM Media Research)