The movie mogul who turned a Bollywood outfit into a global empire

Kishore Lulla is the unassuming film mogul who dominates the worldwide distribution of India's vast Bollywood output.

"If somebody had said 30 years ago that the Japanese car industry would overtake General Motors, people would have laughed. But that is what is going to happen in the movie industry." So says Kishore Lulla, the man labelled "an anomaly" by Management Today. That's down to a remarkably small ego for someone who has made a fortune in an industry "whose vainglorious thesps put our own self-absorbed luvvies in the shade". Having long ago cleaned up as the first international distributor of Bollywood films, this shy, London-based entrepreneur has become a fully-fledged movie mogul, bent on creating the biggest studio in Mumbai. Given the cash advantage the latter now wields over its erstwhile mentor Hollywood, "if he plays his cards right he might just become the biggest combatant in the film world".

Lulla's 'Big Bang moment' came in 2002 when the Indian government finally gave the film business formal industry status. Despite the typically saccharine nature of its output, up until then Bollywood had long been "the biggest money-laundering operation in Asia". The industry was so notorious for its mob links and violence (in the 1990s a minister of culture was jailed for shooting his secretary in a fit of rage) that no Indian bank was allowed near it. So when Lulla turned his sights back east, after an exile of 25 years, his key advantage was that his "hands were clean". When he floated his group, Eros International (LON:EROS), on Aim in 2006, he had little difficulty raising $100m from institutional investors keen on the potential for market growth (see below). Eros now covers all the bases, says The New York Times. It still dominates international distribution out of Bollywood, but it is also the leading importer of Hollywood films into India. Meanwhile, Lulla's movie studio has proved a magnet for stars including Shahrukh Khan, the heart-throb "King of Bollywood" and has 50 films in the pipeline for the next year alone.

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