Pierre-Carl Pelado plans further TVA group cuts

New budget cuts may occur within the TVA group, warns Pierre-Carl Pelado. Quebecor’s president and CEO isn’t willing to part with the company, which posted significant financial losses at the start of the year.

We can not say that there will not be [de compressions]. there will be? Yes, maybe with time,” he said Thursday night in an interview with Gerald Fillion on the show. economic zone, on ICI RDI. The businessman was invited to talk about his recent acquisition of Freedom Mobile, which allowed Quebecor to become the fourth largest wireless service provider in Canada. But the host took the opportunity to grill him about the media group’s future.

Quebecor reported its first-quarter 2023 financial results just before that; Its subsidiary, Groupe TVA, reported a decrease in revenue of $8.4 million compared to the previous year. The CEO of the group explained this decline in profitability, among other things, by competition from the web giants, which have a monopoly of 80% of advertising revenue, but also by Radio Canada, which benefits from public financing.

“We will not be able to live with losses like those we suffered in the first quarter. No company can live with permanent losses,” Mr. Pelado said during the interview, emphasizing, however, that he did not want to part with TVA Group.

Recall that Quebecor had already canceled 240 centers last February, including 140 in the TVA group, due to large financial losses in the fourth quarter of 2022 due, among other things, to the decline in profitability of TVA and TVA Sports.

Asked privately on TVA Sports, Mr Pelado indicated that closing it down was not in the plans “at the moment”. He said he was awaiting the pending “arbitral award” at the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC). Quebecor got into a dispute with Bell over the amount the distributor paid for access to TVA Sports. In the businessman’s opinion, this decision will be “crucial to the future of TVA Sports”.

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