french media group Canal+ will on Wednesday publish its full-year 2025 financial results – the first annual figures to include subsidiary MultiChoice Group since the London-listed company completed the acquisition of Africa's largest pay-television operator.
The results covering the year ending 31 December 2025 will be closely watched in South Africa, where the future of DStv and the wider MultiChoice business remains a subject of intense interest among consumers, investors and the content production industry.
Canal+ is expected to present its post-deal future Africa strategy in more detail to investors on Wednesday.
In a January investor presentation, management already outlined a target of more than €400 million in run-rate cost synergies by 2030, with more than €150 million expected in 2026 alone. The company said it has already achieved more than €80 million of free cash flow synergy through content renegotiation, hardware cost reductions, technology optimization and the restructuring of MultiChoice's long-term debt.
The most dramatic move ahead of Wednesday's results came last week, when MultiChoice confirmed the closure of its streaming service Showmax – an 11-year-old platform that had become the continent's most ambitious domestic challenger to Netflix and other global streamers.
Based on data disclosed by MultiChoice, Showmax's trading loss in the year ended March 2025 was about R4.9 billion, up significantly from about R2.6 billion a year earlier, after Comcast failed to hit its targets in February 2024 after a high-profile and expensive relaunch in partnership with NBCUniversal.
'stop the bleeding'
canal+ ceo maxim plain It said in January that Showmax was “not commercially successful” and that reducing its losses would contribute significantly to the group's cost-cutting programme.
The closure is likely to deepen concerns about the shrinking pool of major streamers turning out largely African content in the local production industry
A key operational metric to watch on Wednesday will be whether Canal+ has managed to slow the bleeding in DStv's subscriber base, especially at the high-margin top end of the market.
Reading: MultiChoice pulls the plug on Showmax
in one Interview with TechCentral Last month, David Mignot, CEO of MultiChoice Group, acknowledged the seriousness of the crisis. His order, as he formulated it, is simple: “Stop the bleeding, return to growth.”
Mignot diagnosed the problem as a failure of business execution rather than a lack of materials. “The content is fantastic… the depth, the range of content across MultiChoice – SuperSport and M-Net and Africa Magic and everything – is incredible,” he told TechCentral.
The clearest hint of the new strategy came in the same TechCentral interview, when Mignot confirmed that MultiChoice would DSTV prices will not increase in April – Breaking the long-standing tradition of annual increases. As recently as April 2025, the company increased bouquet prices by between 2.1% and 7.9%.
“I want to give a clear answer, because we are gaining customers, this is absolutely not the right time to raise pricing,” Mignot said. “As we say, we are not planning any price increases.” He did not rule out price hikes at the end of the year should the rand decline sharply, which would drive up content licensing costs – and the risk-sensitive rand has weakened sharply in recent days amid the US-Israel war against Iran.
At group level, Canal+ guided on its half-year results for 2025 earnings before interest, tax and amortization of around €515 million and cash flow from operations of more than €500 million, although management warned that some of this was driven by one-offs. Free cash flow for the full year was guided at more than €370 million.
Wednesday's results will show how MultiChoice consolidation has reshaped these numbers. The combined entity now claims more than 40 million customers in approximately 70 countries and has a long-term ambition to reach 50 to 100 million.
Canal+ is trading on the London Stock Exchange following a December 2024 listing. – (c) 2026 NewsCentral Media
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