Fast forward to February this year, RANS says it will hold an initial public offering (IPO), but first, it needs the public to recognize the company as a standalone entity, independent from the couple.

RANS Entertainment’s Raffi Ahmad spoke to The Jakarta Post’s Deni Ghifari on Feb. 28, and he revealed his plans to do just that.

 

Question: What’s the plan for RANS Entertainment?

Answer: RANS was named after Raffi Ahmad and Nagita Slavina. It was originally meant to take care of our personal branding for TV, YouTube and Instagram. But as time goes by, I think people need to see that RANS is not merely us, but it is a company, a corporation.

I want RANS to be my legacy when I’m no longer here. When I die, RANS remains.

We have numerous business units and we’re developing so that one day the company does not rely so much on me and my wife for branding.

We want to expand outside Java for now because people there are waiting for our products.

 

What are the business units?

We have many business units but the biggest one is the media, which is anchored to the intellectual property of the contents revolving around our family’s lifestyle.

But the media team is growing now. We don’t stop at monetizing YouTube, Instagram and TikTok as we have animation and live shopping too.

On top of that, we have recently expanded to FMCG [fast-moving consumer goods] and F&B [food and beverages]. We also have property in the form of two beach clubs, one in Bali named Mari Beach Club and the other in Padang called Marawa Beach Club.

We received pre-IPO placement one-and-a-half years ago from several investors so now we are going to build our fundamentals through those business units.

 

What’s the plan for the IPO?

We are observing the market. We are getting our fundamentals ready and we have received pre-IPO placement from Emtek’s subsidiary PT Indonesia Entertainment Group worth 12 percent of our whole capital.

There were several personal investors too such as Mas Kaesang Pangarep [President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo’s son] and we will reveal the other investors by the end of this year.

Now, I still hold the majority with around 60 percent ownership. We’re thinking of selling 15 percent when going public.

Regarding when, we can actually just go for the IPO this year, but, as I said, we still need more time to let people know that RANS is not merely Raffi and Nagita. It’s no longer just a YouTube channel, Instagram or TikTok. We want people to recognize us through our business units as well.

 

What about cash flow?

Our valuation was around Rp 2.7 trillion [US$174.5 million] back in our pre-IPO time. Alhamdulillah [thank God] we are profitable now; we are unlike those companies who are only selling dreams with negative cash flow.

We are aiming to have a revenue of Rp 1 trillion every month by the time we go public and we have much monetization potential to reach that.

From media monetization, I alone can draw in between Rp 300 billion and Rp 400 billion, but we don’t want RANS to depend so much on me. That’s why we want to push the non-media ends of our business.

We have experimented with FMCG as well. So far, we only have one product, a seaweed snack called Rumut. We have only sold it in traditional markets, but the turnover is incredible.

Rumut has only been sold for a month in Java, not that widespread. We haven’t advertised it and it’s not yet even in a modern market, but it has brought us Rp 10 billion and we take around 20 to 25 percent of profit off of that.

We are targeting around Rp 50 billion to Rp 100 billion of revenue from this end in one or two years.

 

What are the plans for F&B and FMCG this year?

For F&B we have Kaarage Kei and The Hive Kitchen, where we brought in Japanese chefs for the former and partnered with a Balinese entrepreneur whose German wife knows a delicious Berliner Kebab recipe for the latter.

We are also planning to have a ramen [business] and maybe we will release another five or six more food chains this year. We aim to have like 100 to 250 stores in Indonesia in two or three years, all before the IPO, so it would go nuts when the IPO happens.

So far, we have only one product for FMCG and we are looking to have, like, four more, but we don’t know yet whether that can be realized this year. We own the brands, but we don’t have a factory for [them] yet. We still partner with others for production.

The problem with seaweed is that we need to import it, so we cannot mass produce yet. That’s why we only own the brand.