The most revealing number in Philippine media is not ratings, subscriber counts, or YouTube views. It is the share of each peso of revenue that survives the direct cost of making and delivering content. By that measure, the country’s two most storied television brands now inhabit very different worlds. In 2025, GMA7 posted a gross profit margin of 50.97%, down only slightly from 52.37% in 2024. ABS-CBN managed 16.52%, a touch above 16.18% a year earlier. In plain terms, GMA kept a little over 50 centavos of gross profit from every peso of revenue, while ABS kept only about 16.5 centavos.
That gulf is not a quirk of accounting. It is a map of two business models. GMA remains the Philippines’ dominant free-to-air broadcaster, still benefiting from the old but lucrative economics of mass television: national reach, ratings leadership, and an advertising machine that continues to throw off high-margin revenue. Its 2025 consolidated revenue rose to about ₱18.12bn, while gross profit stood at roughly ₱9.23bn. Advertising still supplied more than 90% of revenue, and the group’s channels reached 87.5% of total Philippine viewers, or about 63 million people.
ABS-CBN, by contrast, is no longer a conventional broadcast network in the old sense. Its 2025 annual report shows a company rebuilt around content production and distribution, digital platforms, live events, films, music, and a still-troubled cable and broadband arm. The group’s 2025 revenue was about ₱15.85bn, against gross profit of only about ₱2.62bn, which is what yields the 16.52% gross margin. The improvement from 2024 was real, but modest; it left ABS-CBN with a gross-margin profile that looks more like that of a struggling distributor than that of a dominant broadcaster.
The most obvious reason is distribution. GMA still owns the country’s leading broadcast platform and monetizes that audience directly through airtime sales. ABS-CBN, having lost the ability to operate its own nationwide broadcast service in 2020, now distributes content through A2Z, AllTV, cable and satellite, its own iWant platform, and third-party outlets such as YouTube, Facebook, Netflix, Amazon Prime, and other partners. That strategy has preserved reach and relevance, but it has changed the economics. A company that owns the pipe and sells the commercials usually captures more of the value chain than one that must rely on partnerships, licensing, and platform sharing.
The contrast shows up starkly in revenue composition. GMA’s 2025 filing describes a business in which advertising remains the core product: ad revenue was about ₱16.57bn, up modestly from the previous year, and still accounted for the overwhelming majority of sales. Even with higher production costs, GMA could preserve an ample gross spread because the basic formula—large audiences sold to advertisers—remains intact. Production costs rose to about ₱8.75bn in 2025, but the company still produced a gross margin near 51%.
ABS-CBN’s revenue mix is broader but poorer. Its Content Production and Distribution segment generated ₱12.59bn in 2025, up 5% year on year, with advertising revenue rising by ₱421m and consumer revenue also increasing. Yet the same segment incurred ₱14.33bn of expenses and still produced a net loss of ₱3.94bn. Even its recovery engine remains expensive to run, because events, films, streaming originals, and content partnerships are not as naturally profitable as selling airtime on a dominant national network. ABS-CBN’s report itself notes that more concerts and events were mounted in 2025, lifting revenue but also adding cost.
The second drag is cable and broadband. Here, ABS-CBN looks less like a media champion than an incumbent utility caught in decline. In 2025, the Cable TV & Broadband segment generated only ₱3.27bn of revenue, down 39% from 2024, chiefly because of a continued fall in subscribers. Expenses, though cut sharply, still amounted to ₱6.15bn, leaving the segment with an operating loss of ₱2.88bn and a net loss of ₱776m. That is the kind of arithmetic that destroys gross efficiency: revenue falls, but fixed and semi-fixed costs remain stubborn. Each remaining peso of sales becomes more expensive to earn.
ABS-CBN’s low gross margin, therefore, reflects more than simple inefficiency. It reflects a company trying to monetize content across fragmented channels while carrying a legacy pay-TV business that is shrinking faster than its cost base can be dismantled. GMA faces structural pressures of its own—its revenue in 2025 was still below 2023 levels, and costs have risen—but its legacy economics remain more intact. It continues to enjoy the advantages of scale, ratings, and direct control over a broadcast platform that advertisers still value.
Indeed, the stability of the two margin trends says much about the durability of those underlying structures. ABS-CBN’s gross margin improved only slightly, from 16.18% to 16.52%, suggesting that management’s cost controls are helping but not transforming the model. GMA’s margin dipped from 52.37% to 50.97%, indicating some pressure from higher production spending and softer underlying ad demand, but still leaving the broadcaster in a vastly superior economic position. The gap between them remained enormous: roughly 34.45 percentage points in 2025.
There is also a subtler point. Gross margin is, in some ways, a purer measure than net profit in media, because it asks how expensive the core product has become before finance costs, impairments, and corporate overhead muddy the picture. On that score, GMA still looks like a highly profitable broadcaster. ABS-CBN looks like a content company whose monetization channels are improving, but whose cost structure remains too heavy for the revenue mix it now commands. One company is still harvesting the last good economics of old television. The other is living in the afterlife of that model.
The result is a tale of two screens. GMA’s screen still sells mass reach at fat margins. ABS-CBN’s screen sells resilience, reinvention and audience relevance—but not yet at anything like the same price. Until ABS-CBN can either extract more value from digital and distribution partnerships or lighten the burden of its declining cable operations, its gross margin will remain a fraction of GMA’s. In Philippine television, the battle is no longer merely over who wins the audience. It is over who still owns the economics of winning it.
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Disclaimer: This is for informational purposes and is not investment advice. Figures are taken from company disclosures and exchange data; valuation ratios include the author’s calculations based on cited inputs.
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