Seven’s profits crater, but company boss denies television is dying

The perception that television is dying is “simply not true”, the chief executive of Kerry Stokes’ Seven West Media says, as profits suffered another steep fall, diving 63 per cent to $16.6 million for the financial year 2025.

With its primary television business under pressure, revenue for the company, which is majority-owned by the billionaire and controls the Seven Network and The West Australian newspaper, dropped 4 per cent to $1.42 billion after its commercial deal with Meta ended, and because of an ongoing decline in free-to-air television advertising.

The company cut its total operating costs by 2 per cent and will again not pay a dividend to investors.

But Seven West chief Jeff Howard said there was “solid progress” made under the company’s new structure, which included earnings growth in the second half of the fiscal year for the first time since the 2022 financial year, led by increased digital ad sales.

The company benefited from the long-awaited arrival of the AFL and summer of cricket on digital streaming platform 7Plus this year under new broadcast deals, with digital audiences and revenue now on the verge of offsetting declines to broadcast TV, according to Howard.

Revenue from 7Plus in the second half of the year grew by 41 per cent.

More internal disruption at Seven added to stagnation. The year concluded with the departure of chief sales officer Henry Tajer after five months. Tajer’s appointment in January was designed to undo a restructure six months earlier, which removed company veteran Kurt Burnette from overseeing company-wide sales, splitting the function across three, newly created divisions.

Tajer and Seven West’s news boss, Anthony De Ceglie, were considered Stokes’ “captain picks”, but De Ceglie also departed this year after 13 months in the role to return to his native Western Australia to head up the NRL’s newest expansion team, the Perth Bears.

In dealing with an interventionist chair such as Stokes, Howard said it would be silly to ignore the thoughts, advice and perspectives of an individual who had been around media far longer than he.

“I speak to the chairman nearly every other day, if not every day. So we are aligned on everything that we are trying to do,” Howard said.

Despite this, Howard said he “completely” owns both the decision to hire De Ceglie and overseeing Tajer’s departure. After Tajer’s short stint, it was agreed he was more effective off the company’s books, and working as a consultant, Howard said. The chief executive rejected the idea that the changes might have affected revenue deals with advertisers.

Upon taking the chief executive’s role in April last year, Howard had pledged to rid the company of “a few bad apples”. De Ceglie’s tenure leading the newsroom was defined by company-mandated cost cuts and departures as part of a reset to move on from the “win at any cost” culture and a number of high-profile scandals.

Yet De Ceglie’s time in the director of news and current affairs job was defined by out-of-left-field experiments, most prominently a horoscope segment in the news and a three-minute comedy sketch at the end of the week. Both were scrapped, but not before the network’s ratings position against rival Nine Network suffered. Nine owns this masthead.

“We tried a lot of things, a lot of them worked really well, some of them didn’t work as well as we would have liked, and so we’ve made some changes on those,” Howard said.

“But Anthony had a really positive impact on the way we think about a bunch of topics.”

Howard’s full pay packet totalled $1.26 million, which fell far short of his predecessor James Warburton’s final full-year pay of $2.77 million.

Seven West’s financial position has continued to sour over the course of five successive years, with 2025 profits 95 per cent down compared to 2021. The company’s share price has languished in that time, and sat at 14¢ on Tuesday morning, down 7 per cent from when the market opened.

Howard said there was nothing “active or announceable” in relation to discussions between Seven and ARN Media, one of Australia’s top radio firms, of which Seven owns a 15 per cent stake.

The two companies have long been considered an ideal match to help grow scale amid challenges from global television, streaming and digital audio firms.

More work was needed to push back against the “shiny new toy mentality” for marketers relating to global firms such as Amazon now selling ads on their platforms, Howard said.

The drop-off in advertising revenue for free-to-air television despite audiences holding must be addressed, Howard said.

Recent full-year figures from Guideline SMI show a 16 per cent decline for free-to-air television ad revenue across the market. Digital video revenues, which still comprise a fraction of total revenues for the major commercial networks and include revenue for major tech companies, rose 15 per cent.

E&P analyst Entcho Raykovski said Seven’s result fell just short of consensus expectations, but that the company’s outlook was “somewhat encouraging”.

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