Amid an unprecedented financial struggle, MultiChoice, Africa’s biggest entertainment corporation, has revealed how it will recover after losing R800 million and 1.2 million subscribers in the 2025 financial year. Hint: the answer is five letters and one symbol.
French entertainment powerhouse Canal+ could be described as one of Europe’s biggest MultiChoices, an entertainment corporation that offers satellite TV, sports packages and streaming and produces its own content similar to Randburg’s resident multinational broadcaster.
Why MultiChoice needs Canal+
In its results presentation for 2025, MultiChoice describes its rationale for the impending merger between the two companies that, once finalised, will see the creation of Africa’s widest-reaching entertainment mega-conglomerate with the unification of both the English-speaking and French-speaking halves of the continent.
The merger with Canal+ represents “greater scale and resources [that] would improve the ability to address key structural challenges and opportunities,” says MultiChoice. It explains a vision that could position Africa to compete, at least in the media space, with some of the world’s biggest companies.
This includes bonuses like “increased resources to grow and compete against global media players,” and a “larger customer base which can be leveraged.”
MultiChoice says that the greater scale and distribution that Canal+ can grant it will allow it to further invest in its offerings, giving customers a “best-in-class experience.”
Finally, the company describes its saving grace, the “enhanced risk profile” that the French firm is offering, one that would make MultiChoice “better positioned to face headwinds given [Canal+’s] spread across 3 continents.”
Why is MultiChoice doing this?
While MultiChoice has had a long relationship with Canal+, with the French company owning 45 percent of its shares, the acquisition talks began ramping up coinciding with continued poor financial performance from the African company.
It became technically insolvent in 2024 after announcing a R4.1 billion loss for the year, and now in its latest 2025 results it posted a further R800 million loss thanks to pressures from African currencies becoming weaker than the US Dollar and a widespread cost of living crisis on the continent.
Subscribers for its content left in droves, having 1.2 million less paying monthly customers than it did a year prior.
An ever-changing entertainment landscape has not been kind to the company, which counted more than 20 million subscribers around Africa in 2020. Headwinds have seen this number to just over 14 million.
“The impact of structural industry changes in video entertainment, such as the rise of piracy, streaming services and social media, as well as the cost of investing in Showmax, has materially affected the performance of the MultiChoice Group,” it said earlier this week.
It’s not all bad news though as the company said it managed to save R3.7 billion in 2025 (it sold its insurance business to Sanlam) and it reported a strong increase in subscribers to Showmax, with a 44 percent growth. Meanwhile DStv Internet revenue grew by 85 percent and DStv Stream revenue increased by 48 percent, indicating hope for these business areas.
How far along is the MultiChoice Canal+ merger?
Canal+ is offering MultiChoice a R125 cash offer per share for all the shares it doesn’t own and there is no chance that MultiChoice will decline this offer… not right now.
MultiChoice told us that the acquisition “awaits various approvals, including from the Competition Tribunal.” The Tribunal recently received a recommendation from the Competition Commission to approve the transaction, though only if Canal+ could adhere to a few promises like not firing all of MultiChoice’s South African employees for one.
The current deadline for all the process of the merger to be finalised is 8th October 2025.
Aside from the acquisition, MultiChoice is already seeing its original content distributed by Canal+ in its markets, like Senegal. We recently found the first season of Shaka iLembe, one of South Africa’s biggest and most expensive productions, being advertised for the Canal+ Pop streaming platform as a “Canal+ Original Series.”
0 comments:
Post a Comment