Applause rang out in the lobby of the JSE last week when Maxime Saada heralded the listing of Canal+ as “the first French company to list on the JSE”.
The bankers who engineered Canal+’s R55bn takeover of MultiChoice last September, JSE executives, analysts and journalists all cheered as Saada blew the kudu horn to signal the beginning of trade and the French company’s debut on the exchange.
Canal+ had listed on the London Stock Exchange (LSE) only 18 months ago, but Saada gushed about how this listing in South Africa “reinforces our dual-continental approach, strengthening our ambition to be a bridge between Europe and Africa in the entertainment industry”.
For the JSE, it is a boon: with listings having slipped sharply from 600 at the turn of the century to 280 now, any new name on the board is a win. To have a company listed locally that Saada describes as “the only global media and entertainment company listed on the exchange” will at least provide pension funds and investors with more options.
And for Canal+, this is a big deal — not least because it is ploughing a huge amount of money into South Africa, when so many other global investors have done the same and come up short. The world’s largest retailer, Walmart, which bought Massmart for R17bn in 2011 only to see its value plunge by more than 80%, is a cautionary tale.
The question is, will anyone bite?
Pay-TV, as MultiChoice knew all too well, is a hard-fought and expensive game. Streaming services Netflix, Disney+, Apple TV and Amazon Prime Video have launched in South Africa. They are luring away millions of South Africans who, from 1986 until about a decade ago, had remained loyal monthly subscribers to its platform. And at the same time, MultiChoice’s crown jewel in a sports-mad country, SuperSport, has been squeezed by the soaring cost of broadcasting rights, to the extent that it was forced to ditch the Winter Olympics in February.
“DStv is only worth it for the live sport, and even then, I downgraded to the streaming service,” said one person on a chat forum debating the merits of the service. “I cannot remember the last time I watched a movie on the platform.”
This isn’t an isolated experience. When was the last time you tuned in to M-Net to watch a movie? If you are like the average South African, your DStv package is probably mostly used for watching the news, the football and the Boks.
But having forked out R55bn in the deal, which finally got the green light in September, Canal+ is desperate to make it work. And Saada has a high-stakes and controversial plan which some critics believe is doomed to fail: doubling down on satellite TV and betting against streaming.
“Satellite enables you to reach 100% of the population [in Africa],” Saada told the Financial Times last year. The streaming operators, he said, will be weighed down by unreliable or absent broadband services across the continent and don’t have the ability to build satellite services. “They have to wait until broadband penetrates [further] and, in the meantime, we can deliver.”
It’s a strategy that hinges on a few critical assumptions. First, and positively for Canal+, Africa’s population is the fastest growing in the world, expected to exceed 2.5-billion people by 2050 from 1.6-billion now.
Second, while more than two-thirds of African consumers do have internet access, thanks largely to the proliferation of cellphones, fast broadband access still lags and remains pricey. But, negatively for Canal+, broadband access is growing rapidly as costs plunge. Betting against streaming in this context is, as one analyst put it euphemistically, “risky”.
If South Africa is any indication, this is no exaggeration.
In 2023, MultiChoice reported having 17.3-million pay-TV subscribers. But last year, it shed 1.2-million of these, and 1.6-million the year before that. Today it sits at 14.5-million.
The true picture may be even worse, since many subscribers have traded down to lower-cost packages or opted for the streaming-only package. Subscribers to the premium DStv package, which has all the bells and whistles and costs nearly R1,000 a month, have fallen from 2.35-million to below 1-million in a decade.
The result: for the year to March 2025, MultiChoice clocked up R49.8bn in revenue, down from the R59bn it got two years before. This is a business model that appears to be in trouble, yet Saada is betting big on its revival.
While MultiChoice had framed its own streaming service, Showmax, as the future, Canal+ unceremoniously killed the platform in April. That might have seemed like the first step in Canal+’s “satellite-first” strategy, but actually it was a mercy killing.
Showmax had been billed as Africa’s answer to Netflix, a homegrown streaming platform with ambitions to dominate the continent through local content, sports and partnerships with major international studios such as HBO. But despite much-hyped “relaunches” and “strategic pivots”, Showmax was bleeding money. In the year to March 2025, Showmax made a loss of R4.9bn and revenue of just R753m.
Saada saw no clear path to profitability for Showmax, deeming it an “expensive failure”. And he wasn’t wrong. But it does illustrate how much rides on his satellite strategy, both for the company and for a local film industry that now depends on MultiChoice for its survival.
It helps certain people, but it doesn’t help the broader market
— Billy Dundee
Walking the talk
When Canal+ first announced its takeover, the local film industry was abuzz about the potential for new investment. Saada spoke confidently, touting his “belief in Africa’s future and its creative industry”. Investment was even an explicit condition of the takeover: Canal+ agreed to spend more than R20.6bn on “acquiring, commissioning, and producing South African general entertainment and sports content”.
Local production teams were overjoyed, and the creative industry prepared to bask in what they expected to be lucrative global audiences. So far, this has been a grim disappointment. One business owner, who produced shows for MultiChoice over a decade, tells the FM that the Canal+ takeover has in fact “caused the most disruption seen over the past 20 years”.
At one point, MultiChoice made up 90% of his business. It has fallen off a cliff since Canal+ got involved. “It seems as though MultiChoice has become leaderless or directionless,” he says. “The impression it has given us is that in the press, Canal+ is going to say it will support the local industry, but the actual materialisation of that work doesn’t come through.”
Billy Dundee, who owns production and distribution company Black Sheep Films, has had the same experience. “With the news of Canal+ taking over, what we found on our side was that MultiChoice stopped buying content, stopped committing to content, and all their budgets were cut,” he tells the FM.
Dundee says MultiChoice’s actions, along with the withering of the government rebate for film production, have effectively “killed off the industry”.
MultiChoice, he says, simply “cut everyone off”. In his case, this left him with more than 100 films to sell, but no buyer in sight. “You have to buy content years in advance because of how the market is. So we had already purchased content two years in advance. And we’ve got zero buyers for that,” he says.
Insiders say that Canal+, despite its vaunted promises, has told the industry nothing. This has created intense insecurity in an environment that wasn’t exactly stable before Canal+ arrived. “We’ve gone through retrenchments, we’ve gone through downsizing, we’ve suffered huge financial loss with having to cash-flow the shortage,” an anonymous business owner says. “Some of the agencies I know have closed.”
If anything, this vacuum illustrates just how pivotal MultiChoice had been in supporting the local film industry.
This is a point Dundee acknowledges. “MultiChoice was really important for the industry,” he says. Asked if any of Canal+’s promises have materialised, he replies: “Not at all.”
On the plus side, Canal+ has announced that it will spend R300m producing a local film on Hugh Masekela. This is a step towards engaging with South African content, but the industry is wary that this may simply be a one-off deal. Dundee says: “It helps certain people, but it doesn’t help the broader market”, which is what was promised.
Africa will be our growth engine for years to come
— Maxime Saada
This disconnect between MultiChoice in South Africa and the Paris-based Canal+ team is obvious to those in the industry. And it has manifested in its schizophrenic approach to local content, says the business owner. “DStv had a phenomenal integration into the continent. And it seems like there’s very little integration from the French side,” he says. “The French make decisions from Paris on what work is commissioned and who works on it.”
To some, this suggests MultiChoice’s unique African culture has been sold for a bunch of magic beans that have so far failed to sprout. “It feels like there’s very low consideration for what this particular market and continent requires.”
Analysts also warn against disconnecting from what local audiences want, in a bid to globalise or slash costs. Vestact’s Bright Khumalo says: “MultiChoice’s edge was [being] African; it could issue content in Zulu, Xhosa, Tswana, Afrikaans.”
Understanding the unique African market is the key to getting eyeballs on the continent, Khumalo says, but the danger is that Canal+ will forget this as it brings MultiChoice under its banner.
Script for survival
When the FM put this to Saada, he characterises the drop in domestic production as a “temporary operational pause” rather than a permanent halt.
He says the contraction is a necessary consequence of an aggressive triage operation to halt the financial bleeding in MultiChoice’s legacy ecosystem. This drop in commissioning new shows, he says, is the collateral damage of closing Showmax, as productions tied to that platform had to be wound down.
“Africa will be our growth engine for years to come, and we will ensure our partners, shareholders and the creative community benefit from, and share in, our success,” he says.
He insists that Canal+ is deeply confident in its ability to reverse MultiChoice’s fortunes, promising that the group will invest significantly in South African talent not merely out of regulatory obligation but because the continent holds the greatest untold stories. As it is, he says, most of Canal+’s 40-million subscribers are in Africa.
He cites a high-budget slate of upcoming projects designed to re-engage the local workforce, including The Road Home, a film about Paul Simon’s Graceland, which will employ 500 local professionals; the third season of Shaka iLembe; and an adaptation of Americanah. These follow the successful all-local production model used for How to Make a Killing and Spinners.
Over the next three years, Saada says Canal+ will produce 100,000 hours of African content.
Perhaps more fundamentally, it is launching a huge boots-on-the-ground campaign to expand its subscriber base: 1,000 field agents, door-to-door sales representatives and local equipment installers are being sent directly into neighbourhoods across Sub-Saharan Africa. The plan, it seems, is to use the European company’s financial clout and bargaining power to lower the cost of entry for new subscribers.
“We’re targeting … 100-million households in Africa with electricity and a TV set,” said Saada last week at Canal+’s listing. The company has set aside €100m specifically to revive growth at MultiChoice.
In part, this is about understanding the practical realities of cost.
Canal+ Africa CEO David Mignot says that until now it cost a South African consumer about €38 to buy a standard DStv decoder, satellite dish and professional installation — nearly three times what it costs in Francophone Africa. It plans to slash this to €24 by aggressively renegotiating manufacturing contracts with hardware providers based on their combined 42-million subscriber scale.
Still, the monthly cost of access for the top-end premium package remains high, at R979. For those willing to cut some channels, or use streaming, this falls as low as R299.
What has allowed MultiChoice some measure of insulation from rivals such as Netflix is that it has something of a monopoly on top-end sports content through SuperSport. And it’s not just for those who want to watch all the Springbok rugby games, Formula One races, the tennis Grand Slams or the Proteas on tour, but also niche sports such as American football and mixed martial arts.
“SuperSport is one of the strongest sports broadcasting brands in Africa, if not the world,” says Saada.
Recognising this, Canal+ has moved aggressively to fortify this crown jewel. In an announcement timed to coincide with the JSE listing, MultiChoice said it had finalised a multiyear broadcast rights extension, locking down exclusive live coverage rights for the Premier Soccer League, the Betway Premiership, the Motsepe Foundation Championship and other premier domestic knockout tournaments. It will also broadcast the Fifa World Cup, which starts today, live to those on the cheapest packages too.
It’s the same story for the 2027 men’s and 2029 women’s Rugby World Cups, as well as an exclusive multiyear renewal for the United Rugby Championship.
“[Cutting] the Winter Olympics was not our decision. It was made by MultiChoice in 2024,” says Saada. “We support that decision. It was a good decision. Because nobody was watching.”
If Disney couldn’t keep up with the spending of Netflix, who is DStv or Canal+?
— Bright Khumalo
Dicey prospects
It must have come as a relief to Saada that Canal+’s first day of trading in Joburg went swimmingly. By the time the sun set, the stock had climbed 4.28%, with traders welcoming another company to the shrinking pool of options.
“It’s a fantastic thing,” says Gary Booysen, an investment analyst at Rand Swiss. “It’ll be good for the JSE in terms of listing fees, for transparency on the reporting, even for the retail investors who want to get a broader exposure to offshore media.”
But is Canal+ the sort of opportunity that investors should be leaping at, given the high-risk strategy of targeting satellite over streaming?
Not everyone is convinced. Khumalo says he won’t hold it in his portfolio right now, but this is partly because Vestact “prefers global companies with clearer structural growth, stronger balance sheets and better long-term economics”.
Khumalo argues that while pay-TV might have been a booming business 10 years ago, it’s a different story now. “Consumers are under pressure everywhere, and subscribers have been declining,” he says.
And in terms of price and value, competitors such as YouTube or Netflix, which “can spend a lot of money on new content”, will always have the upper hand. “If Disney couldn’t keep up with the spending of Netflix, who is DStv or Canal+?”
Peter Takaendesa, chief investment officer at Mergence Investment Managers, says there are better medium- to long-term growth stories in Africa right now. “Canal+ shares are light on income potential as the dividend yield is low relative to other opportunities on the JSE,” he says.
Anyway, says Takaendesa, this secondary listing on the JSE was done largely to comply with the conditions of the takeover, rather than through a traditional public offering to raise new capital. As such, local valuations will mirror that of UK market sentiment, with rand-to-pound exchange rate fluctuations thrown in.
Saada disputes this. “We contemplated listing from the very early stages of our discussions with MultiChoice,” he says. “We chose the JSE because the relationship between them and the LSE was very strong, and we were able to do a fast-track process.”
Still, there’s a price for everything. So as Khumalo says: “I’m sure at the right price, somebody will want to buy [it].”
Booysen says Rand Swiss doesn’t hold any streaming services; it also didn’t hold MultiChoice before the deal. “The MultiChoice subscriber numbers were going one way, and the competition was increasing massively,” he says. Only deep-value investors who “look for the most beaten-up stocks” would invest in Canal+, he adds.
This reflects the deep ambivalence among analysts over its growth prospects.
This is partly because streaming isn’t just about profitability, it’s about building scale — which has led companies like Netflix to spend huge amounts of money on building a competitive library, and Amazon Prime to run at a loss for the same reason.
Booysen says Canal+’s purchase of MultiChoice was, to some extent, its effort to buy scale and boost its relevance. But, he says, Canal+ has a host of other problems which it needs to solve. For a start, it has no earnings, and it relies on subscription revenue to function and build its content library. “That model won’t work long term,” he says. “It is really the underdog in this competition.”
Canal+’s share price right now might look like a bargain, but that is because “it has got all these problems”, says Booysen. “The only argument you could make to buy Canal+ at the moment is if you believe in the turnaround story and that somehow they are going to achieve the scale.”
Evidently, some people do. At Canal+’s current share price, most of the 10 analysts who cover the stock in London rate it as a “buy”, with the consensus being that the price will rise 20.2% in a year.
Saada, for his part, is confident that those with the vision to back his company will come up trumps. “We are absolutely and totally confident in our ability to turn [MultiChoice] around,” he said last week. “We have a very strong understanding of the situation and of the levers required to turn this company around.”
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