Canal+ has announced a €100-million (R1.9-billion) “boost plan” to stabilise and restart subscriber growth at MultiChoice. This aggressive investment follows a difficult financial year for the South African-headquartered pay-TV giant, which has continued to lose both customers and revenue since being acquired by its new French parent.
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The scale of the challenge is evident in Canal+’s first full-year results since the acquisition. Over the 12 months ending December 31, 2025, MultiChoice’s subscriber base contracted from 14.9 million to 14.4 million. Revenue slipped 6% to €2.4-billion, while adjusted earnings (EBIT) plummeted 14% to €159-million. Canal+ attributed this deterioration to severe macroeconomic headwinds, particularly currency devaluation in Nigeria, persistent power cuts, and the “expensive failure” of the Showmax streaming service, which is now slated for shutdown.
To arrest this decline, Canal+ is pivoting away from short-term fixes like aggressive price hikes, which it admits worsened original profitability issues. The new €100-million strategy is built on four core pillars:
- Content Excellence: Combining high-quality local productions with broad global partnerships.
- Commercial Simplification: Repricing and streamlining product offers to attract a wider audience.
- Customer Acquisition: Lowering the barrier to entry through hardware subsidies and expanded distribution networks.
- Operational Scale: Transitioning to a “sales-focused model” by recruiting over 1,000 new salespeople across its African markets.
The influx of capital for growth is being balanced by deep cost-cutting measures. Canal+ intends to launch a voluntary severance plan for support functions at MultiChoice and initiate a restructuring of its cybersecurity subsidiary, Irdeto.
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These moves are part of an accelerated synergy plan. Canal+ now expects to achieve €250-million in EBIT savings by 2026, a significant jump from its initial estimate of €150-million. These savings will be driven by the Showmax closure, property rationalization, and the pooling of resources ahead of Canal+’s planned secondary listing on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE), expected by June 2026.
Despite these efforts, the outlook for 2026 remains cautious. While adjusted EBIT is projected to rise slightly to €170-million, Canal+ anticipates that the benefits of its boost plan will be largely offset by a further €140-million drag caused by revenue decline and inflation. The company expects subscriber numbers to continue a “modest decrease” in the coming year, though at a slower rate than previously seen.
