The Lopez family’s listed holding company has, over little more than a decade, transformed ABS-CBN from a fully consolidated operating subsidiary into an associate carried at zero on a consolidated equity-accounting basis — a shift that says as much about accounting architecture as it does about the fall of one of the Philippines’ best-known media groups.
There was a time when ABS-CBN sat squarely inside Lopez Holdings’ numbers. In its 2025 annual report, Lopez Holdings explicitly recalls that ABS-CBN had been treated as a subsidiary in 2012 and prior years, meaning its revenues, costs, debt, and losses flowed line by line through the parent’s consolidated accounts. That changed after the adoption of PFRS 10, when Lopez Holdings said it reassessed control and concluded that it did not control ABS-CBN but did control First Philippine Holdings. From January 1, 2013, the group deconsolidated ABS-CBN and began accounting for it under the equity method.
That accounting pivot matters because ABS-CBN remains economically important to the Lopez empire, even if it no longer dominates the group’s reported financial statements the way it once did. Lopez Holdings disclosed that as of December 31, 2025, it still had a 53.55 percent economic interest in ABS-CBN, held not through direct ordinary ownership but through Philippine Depositary Receipts (PDRs) linked to the broadcaster’s shares. The company’s filing describes this exposure as backed by 481.9 million ABS-CBN common shares and 987.1 million preferred shares, underscoring that the economic stake remains substantial even if the accounting presentation has become more distant.
Yet the value of that stake has been hollowed out by years of losses at the broadcaster. Lopez Holdings’ own annual report says ABS-CBN posted a ₱4.718bn net loss in 2025, an improvement on the ₱6.092bn loss in 2024, but still evidence of a business struggling to recover after losing its broadcast franchise in 2020. Revenues at ABS-CBN fell 9 percent year on year to ₱15.852bn in 2025, according to Lopez Holdings’ summary of its investee’s performance.
On the consolidated books of Lopez Holdings, the result is stark: the ABS-CBN investment has effectively been written down to nil. The filing shows that, for the ABS-CBN investment held through Lopez PDRs, Lopez Holdings had a cost base of ₱5.779bn, but this had been overwhelmed by an accumulated equity share of losses of ₱6.341bn, offset only partly by ₱562mn in other comprehensive income. The outcome was a carrying value of zero for the ABS-CBN investment under the equity-method presentation as of December 31, 2025. The report also disclosed unrecognized equity share losses of ₱2.351bn in 2025, reflecting the accounting rule that once an investor’s interest in an associate is reduced to zero, further losses are no longer recognized unless the investor has assumed legal or constructive obligations.
That is the key to understanding how ABS-CBN “vanished” from Lopez Holdings’ balance sheet — and also why the phrase needs qualification. ABS-CBN has not disappeared economically; it has disappeared on the consolidated equity-accounting carrying line because cumulative losses have exhausted the recognized balance. Lopez Holdings’ notes make clear that investments in associates are accounted for using the equity method and that if the investor’s share of losses equals or exceeds its interest, recognition of further losses stops. In that sense, zero is not a theatrical number. It is the mechanical endpoint of prolonged losses within the confines of the accounting standard.
There is, however, an important wrinkle. On the parent-company books, Lopez Holdings still carries the ABS-CBN PDR investment at ₱2.226bn as of year-end 2025. That figure comes from a ₱5.779bn carrying amount less ₱3.553bn in accumulated impairment losses. So while ABS-CBN has been reduced to zero on one accounting view, it has not been extinguished entirely across the group’s disclosures. Rather, the investment now survives in a more fragmented way: nil on the consolidated associate-carrying basis, but still present as an impaired parent-company PDR asset.
The market backdrop helps explain the severity of the compression. Lopez Holdings disclosed that the market price of ABS-CBN shares was ₱4.21 per share at December 31, 2025, barely changed from ₱4.20 a year earlier. The report also noted that ABS-CBN had not declared any dividends since 2020, depriving Lopez Holdings of one of the usual ways a holding company monetizes a stake in a listed affiliate. That stands in contrast to First Philippine Holdings, from which Lopez Holdings received ₱567mn in cash dividends in each of 2023, 2024, and 2025.
The broader effect is to redraw the center of gravity inside Lopez Holdings. In 2025, Lopez Holdings reported ₱12.054bn in net income attributable to equity holders of the parent, up sharply from ₱6.343bn in 2024, driven mainly by gains linked to First Philippine Holdings and its energy-asset transactions. ABS-CBN, by contrast, appears in the annual report as an associate whose deteriorated economics no longer dominate the group’s consolidated presentation. The old media flagship has become, in accounting terms, a residual interest sitting behind equity-method losses, impairment charges, and an increasingly modest quoted share price.
That does not, by itself, prove anything sinister. Lopez Holdings itself states that the deconsolidation of ABS-CBN dates back to 2013, when it adopted PFRS 10 and reassessed control, not to the recent deterioration in ABS-CBN’s fortunes. But the optics are uncomfortable all the same. In the boom years, ABS-CBN’s scale and cachet helped define the Lopez conglomerate; in the lean years, the broadcaster no longer swells or drags down the group’s consolidated top line in the same direct way. What remains is an economic interest with symbolic weight, but with a recognized consolidated carrying value that has already been reduced to nothing.
In that sense, ABS-CBN has not so much disappeared as changed form. It has moved from being a business that once sat at the heart of Lopez Holdings’ consolidated accounts to an associate whose value has been consumed by losses and whose economic worth must now be inferred from PDR structures, impairment notes, and market quotations. For investors, the more useful question may not be whether ABS-CBN has “vanished”, but whether the remaining disclosures still capture — clearly enough — the economic reality of a once-core franchise that has been reduced, on the balance sheet at least, to zero.
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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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