MUMBAI: Even as naysayers have been saying investor sentiment is pretty negative about the cable TV distribution sector in India, here is a company which is looking to swim against the tide. Cable TV and broadband internet services provider Hathway Cable & Datcom’s board today gave it the thumbs up to make an initial public offering for its subsidiary outfit GTPL Hathway.

GTPL Hathway offers cable TV and broadband services in many cities in India among which figure Pune, Ahmedabad and Kolkata.

The board gave approval to the IPO proposal which seeks to raise funds for GTPL through a fresh issue of equity shares while giving an option to existing GTPL shareholders to sell their holdings. Hathway holds around nine million shares in GTPL, according to a filing wih the Bombay stock exchange on Wednesday.

The Hathway board also gave a go-ahead to the proposal to set up a committee to work on the various aspects of the proposed IPO including regulatory and shareholder approvals. Of course, all these proposals would be subject to shareholder and regulatory approval.

Hathway has 23 headends in 160 cities nationwide and its cable TV service subscriber base as on 31 March 2016 was 12.3 million with 10.6 million of them having migrated to digital cable TV. It had a broadband susbscriber base of 627,000 even as it passed 3.3 million homes. 2.4 million of the cable TV subscribers were in phase I areas; 4.2 million in phase II, while its phase III and IV universe was at 4.1 million.