Kalanithi Maran – Billionaire
Kalanithi Murasoli Maran (born 1964) is an Indian media baron who is the chairman and managing director of Sun Group. He owns television channels, newspapers, weeklies, FM radio stations, DTH services and a movie production house. He also held a major share in the Indian airline Spice Jet from 2010 to 2015.
Career
In 1990, Maran started a monthly video (VHS) news magazine in Tamil called Poomaalai657 which was stopped in 1992. On 14 April 1993, he founded Sun TV with an investment of US$86,000 from a bank loan. Sun TV was listed on the Bombay Stock Exchange on 24 April 2006 upon raising $133 million for 10% of the share capital and catapulting him into the billionaire charts. He was among the few representatives at a roundtable with the visiting then US President Bill Clinton.
By 2010, he was the 17th richest Indian with net worth of US$4 Billion, and was the highest paid business man in India. Maran and his wife, Kavery Maran were ranked second in the list of Indian executive pay charts with a package of ₹62 crore (US$9.6 million) each for the fiscal year 2011–2012, behind Congress MP Naveen Jindal.
He has won Young Businessman awards from CNBC and Ernst & Young, and Forbes magazine named him the “Television king of southern India”.
Business entities
- Sun Network – South Indian Television Channels
- Sun Direct DTH – Direct to Home broadcasting Service
- Suryan FM – Tamil Radio
- Red FM – Multilingual Indian Radio
- Sun Cable Vision and Sumangli Cable – Cable TV distribution
- Sun Pictures – Tamil Movie production house
- Dinakaran – Tamil daily news paper
- Tamil Murasu – Tamil evening news papers
- Kungumam, Muthaaram, Vannathirai, Kunguma Chimizh – Tamil magazines
- Sun 18 – to distribute its channels through cable, DTH, IPTV, HITS and MMDSk
- Sunrisers Hyderabad – IPL team
Source:wikipedia