The performance of state-owned entities during the current regime has been lacklustre at best. Poor governance has led to previously profit-making institutions turn into loss making entities. This change in fortune is also true for the state-owned broadcasting company, Pakistan Television Corporation (PTVC).
For the past four years, PTVC has been the victim of the classic “over-staffing” syndrome, which has plagued SoEs for quite some time now. Nepotistic appointments have resulted in poor management of the organisation whose major expenditure has ironically been on human resource.
According to the SoE Performance Review FY13-15, the state-run television network made a whopping loss of Rs772million in FY14 and Rs437 million in FY15. Since PTVC’s financials are not publicly available, the exact figure for FY16 cannot be ascertained.
However, if local news reports are to be believed, PTVC made a loss of Rs1.6 billion in FY16. This means that the aggregate losses for the four years crossed Rs3 billion! There is no single reason for the sustained abysmal financial performance but a few observations are in order.
Firstly, PTV’s income from advertising has gone down drastically and was Rs3.4 billion in FY16. In fact, the company managed to earn more from its monthly subscription fee of Rs35 that is mandatory and is included in the monthly electricity bill from consumers.
This fee raked in Rs5.5 billion for PTVC from unwilling consumers who might not even watch the national broadcaster but can still be credited for keeping the loss-making entity financially afloat. However, if one takes the number of consumers to be 24.5 million according to Nepra’s State of Industry Report 2016, this revenue should be almost Rs10 billion!
On the other hand, PTV owns eight channels that include PTV Home (the only profitable one), which is its entertainment channel. Then, there is PTV News, PTV Sports, PTV World, PTV National, AJK TV, PTV Bolan and PTV Global.
Out of these channels, PTV World is unarguably where the shoe pinches the most. Costing more than Rs100 million a year, the channel shows purely English content and has thus not fared well in generating considerable viewership. The current government is considering either shutting down the channel or merging it with its existing channel base.
Understandably, PTV being a state-owned channel is serving entertainment needs of people across Pakistan including regions such as Giligit-Balitstan and Azad Kashmir through some of these channels. This should be continued as the problem does not lie in programming and content but rather wasteful expenditures.
In Senate Standing Committee meetings, officials have acknowledged that more than 70 percent of funds allocated to PTVC are being spent on salaries, which leaves little room for capital investment to modernise the existing set-up.
The problem of over-staffing is present in almost all SoEs such as the Pakistan Steel Mills (PSM), Pakistan International Airlines (PIA), all DISCOs and a host of other institutions. PTV’s example is all the more unfortunate as its previous profit making trajectory has suffered as a result.
In this age of unlimited content and a plethora of private TV channels, the national TV service should focus on improving its advertising revenue while streamlining operations to avoid being privatized in the future.
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