ABS-CBN Corp. announced Tuesday that it’s retrenching — a Philippine labor-law term for company-initiated layoffs driven by financial losses, distinct from a redundancy or a franchise-driven shutdown — about 200 employees, roughly 7 percent of its workforce. In a statement, the company said it made “the difficult decision to implement a retrenchment program” after a review of its finances, pointing to regional conflicts, persistent inflation, and slow economic growth as the forces weakening advertising revenue and consumer spending across the content industry broadly, not ABS-CBN specifically.
The number behind that statement: a ₱1.83 billion net loss for the first half of 2026, wider than the ₱853 million loss the company posted over the same stretch in 2025, with revenue sliding to roughly ₱6.88 billion.
Not the First Cut Since 2020, and Not the Second Either
Six years ago, ABS-CBN’s retrenchment came with an outside cause everyone could point to. In 2020, Congress declined to renew the network’s broadcast franchise, and the National Telecommunications Commission ordered its free television and radio operations off the air days later. ABS-CBN laid off about 5,000 of its roughly 11,000 employees in the months that followed, in direct response to the shutdown order.
One of ABS-CBN’s own shows already made a version of that same move. Gandang Gabi Vice, off the air for six years after leaving ABS-CBN, returned on GMA this September 13.
ABS-CBN made a similar financial retrenchment once before this week’s cut, in October 2024 — about 100 employees, 3 percent of its workforce, citing a global decline in the pay TV business and an industry-wide drop in advertising spending, even while touting improved TV ratings, two Star Cinema box-office hits, and a music business boosted by girl group BINI. This week’s statement follows nearly the same shape: acknowledge some wins, then cite outside pressure as the reason people are losing their jobs anyway.
NUJP Isn’t Letting the Framing Go Unquestioned
The 2024 round didn’t pass quietly. The National Union of Journalists of the Philippines (NUJP) condemned it publicly, criticizing ABS-CBN’s lack of transparency with affected staff and calling on the public to remember “how and where this series of job cuts started.” NUJP didn’t dispute that financial pressure was real. Its statement argued that treating each retrenchment as an isolated business decision lets the company avoid answering for a downward spiral with a single starting point: the 2020 franchise fight.
Two of ABS-CBN’s three retrenchments since 2020 had nothing to do with Congress. Both still trace back to the same weakened position the 2020 shutdown left behind — a smaller audience, and a smaller revenue base to absorb the next bad year.
The Pattern the Company Keeps Repeating
ABS-CBN’s message has been the same in all three statements: real bright spots elsewhere in the business, external pressure behind the job losses. That framing may hold up for any one retrenchment on its own, but a company surviving one bad year and a company posting a third round of cuts in six years aren’t the same story. Six years after losing its franchise, ABS-CBN still hasn’t found a version of itself that doesn’t need another round of layoffs to stay afloat.