Network18 Group
company

Network18 Media & Investments Limited (d/b/a Network18 Group) is an Indian media conglomerate owned by the Reliance Industries with 56.89% share headed by Mukesh Ambani and rest of 43.11% is equity holding. Rahul Joshi is the managing director, chief executive officer and group editor-in-chief, and Adil Zainulbhai is the chairman of its board of directors.
Incorporated in 1996 by Geeta and Rakesh Gupta, the company was acquired by Ritu Kapur and Raghav Bahl to be converted into a conglomerate holding company between 2003 and 2006. It oversaw one of the largest collections of media properties in India following its conversion but became encumbered with debt due to aggressive expansions. In 2012, the company entered into a debt agreement with Reliance Industries, through which it was granted a number of channels from the ETV Network. The agreement eventually enabled a hostile takeover of the company in 2014.
History
1996–2007: Acquisition and restructuring
SGA Finance and Management Services was incorporated on 16 February 1996, as a private limited company by Geeta and Rakesh Gupta and acquired soon afterwards by Vidya Devi and Anil Jindal. The company had remained inactive without any clear prospects until it was later acquired by the promoters of Television Eighteen India Limited.
The news broadcasting company Television Eighteen (TEIL) founded by Ritu Kapur and Raghav Bahl, became a public limited company in 1999 and its initial public offering (IPO) received an overwhelming response. The investments through the IPO exceeded the target set by the company by a magnitude of over 50 times by the end of the year, raising ₹2,511 crore (equivalent to ₹31 billion or US$320 million in 2023) in the process.
The public source identifies “Network18 Group” as company. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Network18, Group and company.
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Chronology, provenance and viewpoint should be read together before a broad social or political interpretation is accepted. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 20, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q17078993. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1996, 2003, 2006 and 2012.
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This entry incorporates text from “Network18 Group” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.