Century Business Media IPO

Century Business Media sells out-of-home advertising space — the hoardings, digital screens and panels travellers walk past. Its inventory comes from concessions won from government authorities rather than from land it owns. It holds exclusive advertising rights at five airports (Patna, Ranchi, Deoghar, Darbhanga, Jorhat), non-exclusive rights at Dimapur and Lilabari, and marketing rights at Gaya, Agartala and Silchar. In railways it holds exclusive rights outside station campuses across five East Central Railway divisions covering 714 stations, and it runs Platform Screen Door advertising at Howrah and Esplanade metro stations. It also sells conventional city formats — billboards, unipoles, wall wraps, in-shop branding. Buyers are banks, insurers, FMCG, steel and mining companies, state and central government departments, and media-buying agencies. Operations centre on Bihar, Jharkhand, West Bengal and the North East. Headcount was 58 on 31 July 2026.

Revenue is the fee advertisers pay for space on assets the company mostly does not own. Airport OOH was 61.52% of FY26 revenue from operations of Rs 4,643.34 lakhs, railway 24.82%, city formats 11.01%, metro 2.52%. The matching cost is "purchases of services" — display and installation bought in — at Rs 2,871.02 lakhs, 61.40% of FY26 total income, which is why the EBITDA margin sat at 18.47%. The structural constraint is the concession itself: airport and railway agreements carry a fixed Minimum Monthly Guarantee payable to the authority regardless of what the space actually sells, so weak passenger traffic lands on the company, and rights expire and must be re-bid. Bihar alone was 35.56% of FY26 revenue.