Viaplay Group, the Sweden-based media and entertainment company, has withdrawn its previously announced full-year outlook for 2023 and announced that its board chair Pernille Erenbjerg is stepping down due to ill health.
The company pulled its business forecast for this year following a review of the group’s operations and performance by recently appointed chief executive Jørgen Madsen Lindemann and his new management team.
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The group said the latest withdrawal “reflects a significantly weaker revenue and earnings outlook for the Nordic operations in particular, as the increase in largely fixed content costs in particular is not matched by sufficient revenue growth or cost savings.”
It added its new management team is taking a broad range of actions to address the underlying fall in earnings, including an ongoing redundancy program, content savings initiatives, a review of the international operators, and non-core assets, and discussions with distribution partners.
Viaplay's direct-to-consumer streaming app is available in 13 countries, and the company has a presence to some extent in over 30.
Viaplay said there was no change to the group’s second-quarter 2023 guidance and said it would update its strategy and medium-term outlook in conjunction with the announcement of its second-quarter results on July 20.
Lindemann, who led Viaplay’s former parent company MTG, took over as chief executive of the company last month, with a new operating model subsequently announced in an effort to mitigate an economic downturn.
Lindemann replaced Anders Jensen, after the company announced a downgrade of its short-term outlook for 2023 due to “sharp and rapid deterioration in the television and radio advertising markets.”
Jensen led Viaplay’s aggressive expansion into streaming and its push into expensive original productions. However, he lost the backing of the board after poor second-quarter results, which showed the company posted an operating (EBIT) loss of between $23.1 million and $27.7 million on expected sales of $415 million to $420 million.
Advertising sales also fell sharply, projected to drop between 12% and 16% on an organic basis.
Existing non-executive board director Simon Duffy, meanwhile, has been appointed interim chair of the board while it searches for a permanent successor to Erenbjerg, who has been a member of the board of directors since May 2020 and chair since May 2021.
