Samir Jain

In the early 1970s, Samir joined the family business and served in Rohtas Industries in Bihar, and thereafter, New Central Jute Mills in Uttar Pradesh as an executive director. Samir realised early on that Rohtas Industries, which had been one of the top 3 conglomerates in India, two decades ago, was declining rapidly and needed a change in strategy.

In 1975, Samir joined Bennett, Coleman & Co. Ltd,[3] the newspaper arm of Sahu Jain Industries, which was, at the time, one of the smallest businesses in the Rohtas conglomerate. Over the next decade, Samir juggled between various businesses of Rohtas Industries, and also interned at New York Times, and The Times, London.

By 1984, when Samir returned to India, he was convinced about the immense potential of India’s media industry, and decided to devote his entire focus towards growing Bennett. He took over as Joint Managing Director (with Shri Ashok Jain being Chairman and Managing Director) in 1985, and as Vice-Chairman and Managing Director in 1987, a position that he continues to hold to date.

By 1985, BCCL’s annual revenue was around Rs 70 Cr, and The Times of India had a circulation of 5.6 Lac. Most of the company's revenues came from Mumbai, and the Group had a minimal presence in other markets. The Economic Times had also been a modest business paper at the time, with a circulation of 80,000 in 1985.

Samir Jain redefined what a ‘newspaper’ should be, in Indian context. He emphasized a focus on reader-centricity, with news that is not just informative, but useful, and entertaining. On the business side, he focused on profitability, shutting down editions and businesses that did not make the cut, and letting profitable businesses grow. He brought in management and marketing concepts from his learnings abroad, leading to exponential growth in The Times Group’s reach and scale.

Samir led the transformation of Economic Times to be a ‘Businessman’s Paper’, and with TN Ninan being its editorial head at the time, and with innovations like Invitation Pricing, its circulation grew to 360,000 copies by 1994. Similar jumps were seen in The Times of India and other newspapers. During Samir's time, Times of India has become the largest circulating English newspaper in the world.[4][5][6][7]

By 2002, BCCL had revenues of over 1,200 Cr. This upward trajectory continued until 2019, the last pre-pandemic year, when BCCL had revenues of over 6,000 Cr, and profits of nearly 2,000 Cr. Key innovations by Samir, in the Publishing space, that drove this growth, are:

• Invitation Pricing - Offering flagship newspapers at a much lower "invitation price" on a few days every week, to attract readers to sample the product, while raising prices on other days to keep the monthly price constant.
• Hiking of Ad Rates - Significant increase in advertising rates (for example, from Rs 290 per column centimetre to Rs 1,111 by 1995), by conveying the significant value Times' newspapers bring to them, and by being advertiser-and-reader-centric.
• Mastermind - A rate card matrix that allowed advertisers to buy bundled advertising space across various combinations and editions of Times Group publications, at a better price, which also encouraged cross-selling.
• Restructuring - Having separate editors for "News" and "Views", increasing coordination between publishers (management) and editorial teams, refocusing "Ad Sales" and "Distribution" teams to be more advertiser-centric.
• Reader-Centricity - Significant content and layout changes, to make Times' publications more reader-centric, with news that is informative, useful and fun to know, and with a fine balance between local, national and global reporting.

From the late 1990s, Samir nurtured the expansion of The Times Group into various connected sectors, starting with Radio and Television, and expanding into Digital businesses, Out-Of-Home advertising, Events, Education and more. The intent was to diversify while also building more synergies within the media space.

Samir Jain founded the Brand Capital model used by most prominent publishing houses in India today, in which advertising space is granted to small and medium businesses in exchange for an equity stake. Starting out as "Private Treaties" in 2005, Brand Capital was set up as a separate Private Equity / Venture Capital company in 2010, and today, Brand Capital has impacted over 850 brands and has a portfolio of over $2.5 Bn.

Satyan Gajwani, Samir Jain's son-in-law, is the Vice-Chairman of Times Internet Limited, the digital arm of The Times Group. Satyan has headed Times Internet 2012 onwards, and under Samir's tutelage, Satyan has grown the Times Internet business from a $150Mn valuation in 2010 to a $2.5Bn digital products conglomerate, with presence in Real Estate Platforms (MagicBricks), FinTech (ET Money), Sports (Cricbuzz, Willow TV), Events Management (ET B2B) and more.