The numbers coming out of MultiChoice are not pretty, and Canal+ is not pretending otherwise.
The French media giant has announced a 100 million euro growth plan for MultiChoice, the company behind DStv and GOtv, after a bruising 2025 that saw the African pay TV operator lose subscribers, revenue, and profitability all at once. The figures were disclosed in Canal+’s 2025 financial results released on Wednesday.
MultiChoice ended 2025 with 14.4 million subscribers, down from 14.9 million the year before. Revenue fell 6 percent to 2.4 billion euros.
Adjusted earnings before interest and tax dropped 14 percent to 159 million euros. Canal+ is now warning of a further 140 million euro negative impact in 2026 from the momentum of that declining subscriber base and ongoing cost inflation.
Canal+ did not sugarcoat the diagnosis in its results. The company pointed to a combination of macroeconomic pressure, particularly currency devaluation in Nigeria and widespread power cuts across key markets, an expensive and ultimately failed attempt to compete in streaming through Showmax, and rising costs across content and operations.
It also acknowledged that the short-term fixes MultiChoice reached for, cutting subscriber acquisition subsidies and raising prices, made the underlying problem worse by pushing more customers out the door.
The 100 million euro plan is the response. The centerpiece is a push to hire more than 1,000 sales staff across African markets, shifting MultiChoice toward a more aggressive, feet-on-the-ground sales model.
The logic is that pay TV growth in Africa has always been built through direct human relationships and community-level selling, and that pulling back from that approach contributed to the subscriber slide.
The Showmax situation brings the broader strategic picture into focus. The platform launched in 2015 as MultiChoice’s answer to Netflix and spent years burning through investment without finding a path to profitability.
By the time Canal+ completed its 3 billion dollar acquisition of MultiChoice in September last year, Showmax’s trading losses had widened by 88 percent while its revenue was shrinking.
Shutting it down is less a strategic pivot than an acknowledgment that the streaming war was always going to be expensive, and MultiChoice was never in a strong enough position to win it.
What Canal+ is left with is a core pay TV business with deep roots across Africa, a distribution network that took decades to build, and a subscriber base that, even after the declines, still reaches millions of households across the continent.
The 100 million-euro bet is that, with the right sales infrastructure and without the drag of a money-losing streaming service, the business can grow again.
A detailed integration strategy is expected in Canal+’s first-quarter 2026 strategic update. The pressure to deliver something convincing by then is real.
