The leisure conglomerate behind Paramount Photos is to chop about 2,000 jobs in a bid to scale back prices forward of a merger with the unbiased movie studio Skydance.
Paramount World, which additionally owns CBS, Nickelodeon and the UK’s Channel 5, introduced plans to chop about 15% of its US workforce alongside its newest earnings on Thursday.
The corporate, which has been hit arduous by the decline of cable TV, wrote down the worth of its cable networks by practically $6bn, whilst the corporate’s streaming enterprise reported its first quarterly revenue.
The impairment displays a shrinking viewers for cable TV networks equivalent to Nickelodeon, MTV and Comedy Central, a decline that interprets to decrease promoting income. The announcement comes a day after Warner Bros Discovery took a $9bn write-down on its TV belongings.
The pending merger with Skydance Media pressured Paramount to reassess the worth of every of its models to higher mirror their price to the corporate, ensuing within the write-down. The magnitude of the reconciliation dragged Paramount into an working lack of $5.3bn for the second quarter.
Absent this cost, the media firm would have reported an adjusted working revenue of $867m, or 54 cents a share, forward of Wall Avenue’s forecasts of per-share earnings of 12 cents, in accordance with LSEG.
The corporate’s streaming enterprise, which incorporates the Paramount+ subscription service and its free, ad-supported sibling, PlutoTV, posted its first quarterly revenue, fueled by development in subscription and advert income. The direct-to-consumer unit reported an working revenue of $26m within the second quarter, in contrast with a lack of $424m a yr in the past.
“We’re on monitor to achieve home profitability for Paramount+ in 2025,” the Paramount co-CEOs, George Cheeks, Chris McCarthy and Brian Robbins, mentioned in a joint assertion.
Paramount inventory rose 6% in prolonged buying and selling.
Reuters contributed reporting
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