French media group Canal+ will on Wednesday publish its full-year 2025 financial results – the first annual numbers to include subsidiary MultiChoice Group since the London-listed company completed its acquisition of Africa’s largest pay-television operator.
The results, which cover the year ended 31 December 2025, will be closely watched in South Africa, where the future of DStv and the broader MultiChoice business remains the subject of intense interest from consumers, investors and the content production industry.
Canal+ is expected to set out its post-deal future Africa strategy in much greater detail to investors on Wednesday.
At a January investor presentation, management already outlined a target of more than €400-million in run-rate cost synergies by 2030, with over €150-million expected in 2026 alone. The company said it had already secured more than €80-million in free cash flow synergies through content re-negotiations, hardware cost reductions, technology optimisation 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 shutdown of its streaming service Showmax – an 11-year-old platform that had become the continent’s most ambitious homegrown challenge to Netflix and other global streamers.
Based on MultiChoice’s disclosed figures, Showmax’s trading losses were about R4.9-billion in the year ended March 2025, up sharply from about R2.6-billion a year earlier, after a high-profile and expensive relaunch in February 2024 in partnership with Comcast’s NBCUniversal failed to achieve its targets.
‘Stop the bleeding’
Canal+ CEO Maxime Saada said in January that Showmax was “not a commercial success” and that reducing its deficit would contribute significantly to the group’s cost-cutting programme.
The closure is likely to deepen concerns in the local production industry about the shrinking pool of major streamers commissioning African content at scale
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 higher-margin top end of the market.
Read: MultiChoice pulls the plug on Showmax
In an interview with TechCentral last month, MultiChoice Group CEO David Mignot acknowledged the severity of the crisis. His mandate, as he framed it, is simple: “Stop the bleeding, get back to growth.”
Mignot diagnosed the problem as a failure of commercial execution rather than a content shortfall. The “content is fantastic … the depth, the range of content at MultiChoice – SuperSport and M-Net and Africa Magic and everything – is incredible”, he told TechCentral.
One of the clearest signals of the new strategy came in the same TechCentral interview, when Mignot confirmed that MultiChoice will not raise DStv prices in April – breaking with a longstanding tradition of annual increases. As recently as April 2025, the company raised bouquet prices by between 2.1% and 7.9%.
“I want to give a clear answer, because we are building subscribers, so it’s not exactly the right timing to increase pricing,” Mignot said. “We are not planning, as we speak, any price increase.” He did not rule out prices increases later in the year should the rand fall sharply, pushing 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 at its half-year results for 2025 earnings before interest, tax and amortisation of approximately €515-million and cash flow from operations of more than €500-million, though management cautioned that some of this was driven by one-offs. Free cash flow was guided at more than €370-million for the full year.
Wednesday’s results will show how the MultiChoice consolidation has reshaped these numbers. The combined entity now claims more than 40 million subscribers across roughly 70 countries and has set a long-term ambition of reaching 50 to 100 million.
Canal+ trades on the London Stock Exchange after a December 2024 listing. – (c) 2026 NewsCentral Media
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