As Indonesians Flock To Cinemas, Film Mogul Manoj Punjabi Becomes A Billionaire

This story is part of Forbes’ coverage of Indonesia’s Richest 2022. See the full list here.

Manoj Punjabi joins the list this year with a net worth of $1.05 billion, thanks to shares in his Jakarta-listed film studio, MD Pictures, rocketing almost fourfold in the past year as moviegoers flock back to theaters post-pandemic. Punjabi holds a majority stake in MD Pictures through his holding company, MD Global Investments.

MD Pictures saw its revenue more than double to 382 billion rupiah ($24 million) in the first nine months of 2022 from the year-earlier period, while net profit soared sevenfold to 153.9 billion rupiah. For the full year, revenue is expected to double to 500 billion rupiah. “For a content house firm, that’s good and it can keep growing with the plans of expansion,” says Punjabi, cofounder and president director of the company, which had a market cap of 23.3 trillion rupiah as of mid-November. His wife Shania Manoj Punjabi serves as president commissioner.

MD Pictures’ growth is driven by box office sales, which accounted for 75% of revenue in the nine-month period, up almost 9,000% from a year earlier, when the pandemic kept people out of cinemas. As of October, it had attracted 15 million viewers in 2022, and it expects to reach 18 million by year-end. One of its hits, a horror film called Curse of the Dancing Village, is the highest-grossing Indonesian movie of all time, attracting some 9.2 million viewers and $25 million in receipts.

To fuel expansion, MD Pictures is planning a rights issue of up to 1.9 billion new shares, equal to 20% of total stock by mid-2023. The offering is expected to raise as much as 2.4 trillion rupiah that can be used to improve distribution, according to Samuel Sekuritas Indonesia in a June research note. “My vision is to make MD Pictures an integrated content company, as content is king,” says Punjabi.

Punjabi earned a bachelor’s degree in marketing and finance from IEU School of Business (now Esa Unggul University) in Jakarta in 1993. He cofounded MD Pictures (originally called MD Media) and its affiliate, MD Entertainment, in 2002 with his wife and parents, taking the lead role in growing the companies that today have interests in movies, music and animation production, and restaurants.

MD Pictures raised 274.6 billion rupiah in an IPO in 2018. Last year, Chinese tech giant Tencent Holdings bought almost 15% of the company from Punjabi. The movie mogul says the investment shows the confidence of the global market in MD Pictures’ potential, adding: “This is a challenge for me to prove it and take MD to the next level.”