Black Thursday in the Quebec media world: Quebecor announced the elimination of 240 positions after the TVA Group suffered significant losses in all its components during the last quarter. The difficulties of the generalist TV network and the sports channel TVA Sports are in question.
Groupe TVA has not indicated in which sectors these positions will be eliminated. The company simply specifies that 140 jobs will be cut within it, which represents more than 10% of its current workforce. The hundred other jobs affected are elsewhere in the Quebecor family — at NumériQ and Quebecor Content, among others — but their removal is directly related to the difficulties of Groupe TVA. Details of the cuts are expected to be announced in the coming days.
In the last quarter of 2022, TVA Group announced net income before amortization of nearly $7.7 million, a difference of more than $21 million compared to the last quarter of 2021. Poor results which are mainly explained by a significant decline in the profitability of the TVA network and TVA Sports, the latter remaining in a precarious situation since its launch in 2011.
The group’s general-interest channel as well as the specialized channels nevertheless saw their market shares increase during the last quarter. With 40.3 shares — up 1.5 — Groupe TVA remains by far the leading television company in Quebec. But the group’s advertising revenues fell by 2.3%, in a context where it saw fit to increase its investments in television content, in particular to feed its various platforms. Operating costs for the TVA network thus jumped by 19.9%.
Radio-Canada and Bell singled out
This situation therefore places the TVA Group in a difficult situation. The president and CEO of Quebecor, Pierre Karl Péladeau, once again pointed the finger at web giants, such as Netflix and Disney +, who are responsible for “the reduction of television audiences”. He also accuses Radio-Canada of unfair competition: the state-owned company, according to him, appropriates “a significant share of advertising revenues to which are added the fees it charges for subscriptions to Tou. Extra TV”.
Finally, Pierre Karl Péladeau is targeting his main competitor, Bell, which he accuses of deliberately penalizing the Quebecor chains as a cable company. “Unlike all other cable operators in Quebec, Bell TV continues to pay royalties below the market value of our channels, while continuing to favor its own channels, placing itself in a permanent conflict of interest between its status as a broadcaster and that of distributor of its competing channels,” he said.
But the other branches of the TVA Group are also experiencing difficulties. MELS Cinema Studios shows a decline in profitability in the last quarter of 2022 compared to the same period of the previous year. A difference that can be explained mainly by the fact that at this time last year, these studios were working on the most recent film in the saga. transformers.
In addition, the magazine sector is suffering from the reduction in government aid put in place during the pandemic, but also from a drop in advertising and subscriptions, a phenomenon that has been observable for years. In the last quarter, net income before amortization fell by 1.4 million for this sector.