Televisa's World Cup Quarter Masks a Steadier Telecom Turnaround
Mexico revenue +53% and record ViX adds grab headlines, but fiber, cash generation and a re-armed balance sheet tell the durable story.
TLEVISACPO.MX · Earnings Call · 2026-07-24
The World Cup Supercharges TelevisaUnivision — For One Quarter
The headline of Grupo Televisa's second-quarter print is unmistakably the World Cup market. TelevisaUnivision posted revenue of $1.3 billion, up 10% year-on-year, but the composition reveals a concentrated catalyst: Mexico revenue surged 53% to $605 million as the tournament "served as a catalyst for multi-platform growth across our advertising, subscription and licensing businesses," per Alfonso de Angoitia. The U.S. side fell 11% on the absence of the World Cup and cyclical linear softness — a stark split underscoring how event-specific this was. The streaming payoff was the standout. ViX, the exclusive streaming home of all 104 matches, delivered "the highest quarterly subscriber additions in the platform's history," with roughly 1 million World Cup add-ons sold. Management is betting this resets the growth narrative: “We sold around 1 million add-ons of that service. So we're gaining ground and speed of growth.” — Alfonso de Angoitia Noriega, Executive Chairman · 2026-07-24 But the quarter also shows the cost side: operating expenses rose 16% on sports outlays and adjusted EBITDA fell 3% to $388 million. This is a demand reveal more than a profit reveal.The Telecom Engine Room: Fiber, Cash, and a Value War
Underneath the media fireworks sits the more durable story: the telecom turnaround. This call doubled as a third-anniversary retrospective for Francisco Valim's team, and the numbers back the framing. The fiber-to-the-home build has accelerated — 12 million homes passed with FTTH, up from 9 million in February, 60% of footprint, full-fiber targeted by Q2 2027. The revenue inflection is real. Residential revenue grew 1.8% year-on-year, which Valim calls "the best quarter of the last 2.5 years at our residential operations from a revenue growth performance standpoint," after full-year declines of 1.8% in 2025 and 2.5% in 2024. That masks a deliberately soft net-add quarter — just 9,400 broadband adds — as management holds pricing discipline against competitor promotions and defends its customer success metrics: churn below 2% for five straight quarters and the lowest in ten quarters in Q2. Margin is the real engine. Segment operating income rose 5% despite revenue down 3%, with segment margin up 310 basis points to 41.8%, the best in three years. Cumulative OpEx is down 18.4% versus 2023, and leverage has fallen to 1.6x from 2.4x EBITDA, on MXN 16.4 billion of cumulative free cash flow over three years.Consolidation Ambitions, Starlink, and the Road Ahead
The M&A commentary is the most explicit in years.The CFO signals firepower: “our balance sheet today is pretty strong to be able to deal with them.” — Carlos Phillips Margain, CFO · 2026-07-24 Two operational threads complete the picture. First, satellite providers — Starlink moved from implicit threat to explicit partnership, expanding from B2B into B2C with “we see a lot of room for improvement... a very profitable partnership for both sides.” — Francisco Valim Filho, CEO of Telecom Operations · 2026-07-24 Second, AI is deployed across the stack — from TelevisaUnivision's dubbing and effects to Izzi's care and collections — with inference brought in-house to control token cost. The prior quarter already telegraphed the fiber acceleration: “we're already at 9 million homes with fiber today, and planning to get to 15 million, 16 million by the end of 2026.” — Francisco Valim Filho, CEO of Cable and Sky · 2026-02-27 Sky, meanwhile, is managed as a harvest asset — “this is a business that will eventually disappear” — Francisco Valim Filho, CEO of Cable and Sky · 2025-10-24 — and the slowing decline (revenue -20.3% YoY vs -24.6% in Q1) supports that cash-flow framing. So what changed? The World Cup proved ViX's scaling power and TelevisaUnivision's content moat, but the durable shift is operational: telecom revenue inflecting, margins at records, leverage halved in three years, and management re-arming for the consolidation it believes is inevitable. The company is no longer in defense mode — it is choosing its shots.we have been trying to consolidate the cable industry for a very long time. I think it's the right thing that we have to do as an industry... a 4-player market is a complicated market.