One of Rajnikanth’s ‘punch’ dialogues that have endured comes from his 2003 film Baba, a veritable box office dud: “Naan latea vandhalum latest varuven.” (Even if I enter late, I’ll be the latest. Superstars’ colloquialisms do lose their bite in translation). That line pretty much sums up Sun TV group chairman Kalanithi Maran’s new businesses. Be it films or flying machines, even if a few years late, he enters them with a bang.

He went for broke with his very first film. When you throw in Rajnikanth, Aishwarya Rai, S Shankar, a Tamil film director who has seldom delivered a lemon, and an unprecedented production budget of about Rs160 crore, the chances of failure are slim. Not surprisingly, just how much money Maran’s debut production, Endhiran, raked in at the turnstiles in its first week is a matter of happy speculation for Sun Pictures , a wholly-owned subsidiary of Sun TV. Estimates of global box-office receipts range from $15-24 million (about Rs65-105 crore). Any figure you choose would make the film several times bigger than Dabangg, Three Idiots or any Bollywood blockbuster you can think of. Endhiran is the new gold standard for celluloid commerce in the country.

Yet, given the hold Maran’s Tamil channels have not just in the media business in the state, but also its popular culture, it was surprising that the Rs1,438 crore media giant had resisted taking a big bite of the second-biggest movie market in the country. Endhiran drives the point further home.

The runaway success of Endhiran, and the global attention that’s accompanying it, caps off a watershed year for Maran. Only in June, after protracted negotiations, the media baron had realised his ambition of taking his business empire north of the Vindhyas. He acquired a controlling stake in SpiceJet , one of the two profitable low-cost airlines in India, for about Rs940 crore. In one shot, he became a force to reckon with in the aviation business, a position he could cement if he also acquires GoAir, the Nusli Wadia group-controlled low-cost airline he is reportedly talking to for a buyout.

For a long time, it appeared the Sun TV group, like most Chennai-based companies, was content being an insular, regional bully. If Sun’s acquisition of Red FM, a countrywide network of 45 FM stations, in 2007 was a means of testing waters outside its southern comfort zone, the subsequent aggressive, pan-India push of its direct-to-home (DTH) brand Sun Direct and the SpiceJet deal is a confident statement of intent to break the geography barrier.

Despite his success over the past two decades, the 45-year-old, greying-at-the-temples Maran remains painfully media shy. Even during his rare interactions with the press, he’s not known to drop his guard and answers mostly in monosyllables. Sun TV’s current market cap of Rs20,500 crore makes it one of the most valuable media companies in India. Yet, beyond rudimentary financial details such as earnings reports and balance sheets, its website offers no investor presentations or transcripts of analyst interactions. Maran’s office did not respond to telephone calls and a faxed questionnaire for this story.

Being a reclusive businessman has its disadvantages. Stereotypes often stick like greasepaint on a white shirt. While the overt political patronage from Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK), the largest political party in Tamil Nadu, did help the Sun TV Network , it would be too simplistic an explanation for Maran’s rise.

“All his companies are professionally run and are tough competitors because of their pricing policy,” says Manjula Rajagopal, associate editor, and a member of the family that owns the Dinamalar newspaper group, which competes with Maran’s publications. “He is an out-of-the-box thinker and a tough nut to crack. He’s a dynamic businessman and all strategic decisions taken by the group are his.”

After receiving an MBA from the University of Scranton in Pennsylvania in 1987, Maran returned to India and took over the reins of a lumbering family-run weekly magazine called Kungumam. In the past, Maran has said that the choice of multiple TV channels in the US back in the 1980s got him thinking about the opportunities in the regional TV market.

On 14 April 1993, the Tamil New Year day, Sun TV (a direct reference to DMK’s ‘rising sun’ electoral symbol) started

beaming general entertainment programmes for a few hours in the evenings. It was only an extension of the VHS-cassette tape newsmagazine Poomalai, which Maran had been producing primarily for the Tamil diaspora.

Today, Sun Network operates 20 channels, ranging from 24-hour general entertainment channels to those that play round-the-clock news, movies and music in all the four southern states. A majority of them are leaders in their respective markets and categories. Every show on the

Top 10 TRP rankings in Tamil Nadu belongs to the Sun stable.

Maran’s TV strategy, which gives him an operating margin of about 80%, is manifestly failure-proof. Nearly all the content for Sun’s entertainment channels is outsourced. It’s the producers’ job to get ads, which means Sun’s marketing and sales overheads are next to nothing compared to its peers in the North. “That’s the pricing power a solid distribution network gives you,” explains the head of a production house that makes shows for rival Vijay TV. “On its primetime slots, Sun can charge producers up to Rs 5 lakh for a 30-minute show each day.”

It’s easier to drive a hard

bargain when you’re the 800-pound gorilla, especially in your home turf. But the SpiceJet deal offered no such head starts. The low-cost airline’s largest shareholder, Bhupendra Kansagra, was a seasoned businessman. The other large investor was Wilbur Ross — the shrewd ‘vulture investor’ whose stock-in-trade was investing in distressed assets and selling them for a substantial profit.

“Neither party in the SpiceJet deal felt the other was a joker,” says one of the erstwhile shareholders in the airline, summing up the seven-month long takeover at the end of which Maran agreed to buy 37.7% in SpiceJet. Valuation was a major issue with Maran, says a person familiar with the negotiation process. “Even while everyone thought the deal was stitched up, he was negotiating till Friday (the deal was announced on Saturday). He wasn’t averse, it seemed, to walk away.”

The budget airline never had an anchor investor with a desire to invest for the long term. Maran solved that problem for SpiceJet. “He came in as a strategic investor and is not a short-term player,” said Kansagra soon after his exit. “He is what SpiceJet was looking for. Maran is expanding his business base and he is looking to put the best picks in his portfolio.”

Kansagra called Maran a “tough negotiator”. “He tried saving every penny of his,” he said. “Both sides were negotiating hard. In the end, it was a happy deal.” Maybe not for Ross, whose investors are used to five-fold profits. He entered SpiceJet in July 2008 at Rs27 a share and cashed out at Rs45.

For many, Maran and SpiceJet did not make sense. Why would a media baron used to an operating margin of 80% get into a business that usually haemorrhages balance sheets. Even the fabled investor Warren Buffet once remarked that if capitalists had been present at Kitty Hawk, when the Wright Brothers’ plane took off, they should have shot it down.

Maran, however, had been interested in the aviation sector for long, but it was seen more as a whim than a clearly thought-out business idea. When the government opened up licences for domestic aviation companies, he toyed with the idea of applying for one. His attempts later to acquire a small regional carrier in the south, Star Aviation, were also aborted. Maran persisted and SpiceJet happened.

Without Sun Network, the cash cow, Maran wouldn’t have had the millions to plough into SpiceJet. And Sun’s success is in large measure to the group’s unrivalled distribution muscle. While the early-mover advantage made Sun a clear favourite among viewers, its subsidiary Sumangali Cable Vision, a market-leading multi-system operator, ensures the primacy of Sun’s bouquet of channels.

In order to break Sun’s cable monopoly, which was perceived to be the backbone of DMK’s television and cultural propaganda, J Jayalalithaa , the state’s chief minister till 2006, even started a government-run cable TV network. Sensing that the DTH platform could chip away that edge, the group aggressively pushed Sun Direct, its own DTH brand, which now has more than five million subscribers.

The ruthlessness and efficiency with which Maran has been able to scale up each of his businesses indicates that SpiceJet’s rivals are in for some interesting times. While his success in the TV business is better known, Maran has cannily used his channels as a platform to aggressively push his newspapers and magazines. Dinakaran (an all-colour broadsheet) and Kungumam (the compact-sized light-read weekly) — where he had his entrepreneurial tickets punched — are now among the market leaders in Tamil Nadu, according to the latest round of Indian Readership Survey ( IRS ).

The cross synergy that Maran has used to promote each of his businesses has paid rich dividends. The films distributed by Sun Pictures are promoted relentlessly on the group’s TV network, as well as on its FM stations and print publications. Both Kungumam and Dinakaran, the print products, are price warriors and are invariably accompanied by freebies almost every week. Here again, the TV channels promote the magazines ad nauseum.

Those less charitable to Maran attribute all his success to political backing. Kalanithi Maran’s father, the late Murasoli Maran, the former commerce minister, was DMK supremo Karunanidhi’s nephew and his closest confidante. His brother Dayanidhi Maran is the Union minister for textiles. Karunanidhi’s election promise in 2006 to give free colour TVs to the poor in the state was seen as a direct move to help Sun’s TV business.

In fact, till 2007, before the Marans and the Karunanidhi family had a public falling out, Sun TV made no bones about its political affiliation. When Karunanidhi’s son MK Alagiri’s supporters allegedly vandalised Maran’s Dinakaran newspaper office in Madurai, the relationships in the family hit a nadir. The Karunandhi family joined hands with rival media group Raj TV to launch Kalaignar TV.

The Marans and the Karunanidhi family patched up in late-2008. “Political patronage is the only thing that has helped Maran in every industry he steps in. He knows how to capitalise on it well,” explains a Raj TV executive. “That is where he thinks differently from other politician-backed businessmen. Today, Sun TV is so strong that the DMK realises that it is not in its interest to antagonise Kalanithi Maran, while he also knows what political clout can deliver. There is far more mutual respect between the two now.”

Despite the group’s

impressive performance over the past two decades, the quality and depth of professional management at Sun remains a concern. Most top-ranking executives such as Hansraj Saxena (a north Indian who speaks halting Tamil), the COO of Sun Pictures, or K ‘Shammi’ Shanmugam, who heads the radio division, are Maran’s mates from Chennai’s Loyola college.

“That will change,” says a senior Vijay TV executive, which is part of Star TV. “If Maran has to run SpiceJet, he can’t bank on his friends who have no experience in the aviation business. Already, even for TV programming, Maran is having to turn to producers and executives in Mumbai and elsewhere in the North.” Last year, Maran roped in Ajay Vidyasagar, Star’s erstwhile president for content and new media, as Sun Networks ’ COO.

Apprehensions that Maran will ring in sweeping personnel changes at SpiceJet have been allayed for a while. However, the exit of CEO Sanjay Aggarwal, who was considered close to Wilbur Ross, turned out to be a messy affair. Maran, true to style, had already zeroed in on a new CEO before taking charge. “So far, it’s been business as usual,” says one of the employees at SpiceJet.

Maran has also changed the board’s composition, with six new members to join, and has done away with some old hands at SpiceJet. However, the process of him taking over complete control of the airline is limited by the fact that his open offer is not yet complete. Some existing stakeholders have raised objections to the transaction and Sebi has asked Maran to clarify on the issue before the open offer is initiated. Meanwhile, SpiceJet has placed an order of 47 aircraft and its international operations have begun. He might be late, but Maran sure makes his arrival felt.