Univision Finished 2021 With More Growth

Moving forward after its Jan. 31 merger to become TelevisaUnivision, U.S. Spanish-language media giant Univision reported on its final quarter before joining with Mexico’s Grupo Televisa. Wade Davis continues as CEO of the merged company and discussed Univision’s fourth quarter 2021 results with Wall Street analysts on Friday.

Continuing a theme from his previous quarterly call, Davis said the 2021 turnaround for Univision continued in the final quarter.

“Prior to this year, Univision’s ad sales had been in decline since 2016. We moved incredibly quickly to install new leadership. New processes, a new go-to-market approach, new pricing, new packaging, and new products and solutions, all of which delivered incredible results in a short amount of time, outperforming the market with total [core] ad sales up 28% versus 2020,” he said on the call. Including political, the figures released by TelevisaUnivision showed Univision’s full year ad revenues up 22% to $1.6 billion.

“This represents the first time in more than 15 years that Univision has grown ad sales sequentially after a political year,” Davis added.

For the fourth quarter, Univision’s ad revenues were up 0.1% to $435 million, which translates to a 12.1% gain in core advertising.

While not breaking out numbers for the TV station group, Davis said it delivered advertising growth versus both 2020 and 2019. “We remain the destination of choice for local news, with our news telecast ranked number one or number two in seven of our top ten markets.

Just days earlier TelevisaUnivision announced that it would launch ViX as a global Spanish-language streaming service on March 31. The ad-supported free service will succeed Univision’s current PrendeTV and a subscription service with more content, original shows and soccer, ViX+, is planned to launch in the second half of this year.

“We’re not abandoning linear television. Linear television is fantastic for certain types of programming and certain segments of the audience. But there’s programming that works better, and audience segments which can be better served, in a streaming environment. And we believe that the complete Spanish-language viewing experience to the broadest possible audience will be delivered across our combined linear television and streaming platforms,” Wade said.

Because of TelevisaUnivision’s position as the world’s largest producer of Spanish-language TV content, Wade insisted that the company’s streaming financial proposition will be superior to any other company in the streaming business.