The company, which produced acclaimed films including “Mulholland Drive” and “The Pianist,” is transforming into a global entertainment group with a presence in 70 countries to compete with Netflix and Disney.
Chief Financial Officer Amandine Ferré said any deal between Netflix and Warner Bros Discovery should not change the course for Canal+, but emphasised the importance of scale. “The bigger you are, the better leverage you will have in the discussion,” she said.
Following the $3 billion MultiChoice deal, Ferré told Reuters that Canal+ was already finding cost savings through suppliers of set-top boxes, cloud services and satellites. The company has also refinanced MultiChoice’s debt with a lower interest rate.
Canal+ expects cost savings to ramp up progressively, targeting over $179 million annual savings in 2026 and up to $479 million from 2030, compared to an estimated combined 2025 cost baseline of around $9.57 billion. It has already secured over $95.69 million for 2026.
Ferré said Canal+ was assessing what to do about MultiChoice’s streaming service Showmax, which she described as “a big issue” due to its losses. “We won’t stay in this situation because the level of losses is not acceptable for us,” she said.
Chief Executive Maxime Saada said on a call with analysts that the company was in “advanced discussions” with Comcast about the United States company’s 30% stake in Showmax, but he did not comment further on the talks.
Overall subscriber growth was the main priority, Ferré said. “It will take time because you need to relaunch your distribution network.” The company is also evaluating its branding strategy between MultiChoice and Canal+ across different markets
–Reuters–
