Yeah1 axes two television channels to boost performance this year

Yeah1 officially approved halting its Yeah1 Family and iMovie TV changels

Yeah1 has officially approved halting the Yeah1 Family channel from April 1, 2020 and iMovie from June 1, 2020 as part of its restructuring strategy.

Accordingly, as digital advertising is emerging as an inevitable trend, Yeah1’s television assets will be shifted to digital platforms. Based on the group's financial report in 2019, adjourning the two channels will boost the company's quarterly profit by about VND5 billion ($217,400) from the third quarter of this year.

Before striking up a partnership with YouTube, television occupied about half of Yeah1's total revenue and kept steadily growing later on. At its initial public offering two years ago, Yeah1 chairman Nguyen Anh Nhuong Tong asserted that the group would keep focusing on television, while accelerating the development of digital platforms. However, after the breakdown with YouTube in last April that brought the company's worst performance to date, Yeah1 has to restructure itself to revive in 2020 – and the first step is to steadily remove its traditional business, television.

Ending 2018, the group's television channels produced VND731 billion ($31.78 million) in revenue, equaling 44 per cent of Yeah1’s total revenue. The figure suddenly dropped in 2019 by 56 per cent to VND320 billion ($13.9 million). After deducing all kinds of costs, the channel reported a loss of VND48 billion ($2.1 million) despite the profit of VND30 billion ($1.3 million) in the previous year.

This year, Yeah1 also stops investment in producing movies for cineplexes which have suffered heavily due to the COVID-19 lockdown, with earnings dropping by about 80-90 per cent. Currently, all cineplexes are closed under the local government’s directions to contain the pandemic.

In 2019, the local media firm reported VND385 billion ($16.74 million) in net losses and VND1.449 trillion ($63 million) in revenue. It also recorded VND435 billion ($18.9 million) of revenue in the fourth quarter of 2019, down 32 per cent on-year. Notably, the spike in management costs and a $3.6 million provision resulted in losses of nearly VND158 billion ($6.87 million) in the quarter.