Shari Redstone of ViacomCBS says media company will focus on organic growth

Dec 1 (Reuters) – Shari Redstone, chairwoman of ViacomCBS Inc (VIAC.O), who has in the past hinted at other deals to bolster the media empire, said on Wednesday the company would focus on growth organically and would seek opportunities for global expansion.

In an interview at the Reuters Next conference, she said the company remained open to “always looking at the opportunities there”, but had no immediate desire to merge.

ViacomCBS, with its market valuation of $20.1 billion, is one-tenth the size of Walt Disney Co . As media conglomerates rushed to hoard content for subscription and ad-supported streaming video services, the company’s relatively smaller scale sparked speculation that Redstone would seek another deal.

“I think our growth trajectory is actually quite high at this point,” Redstone said. “Our ability to grow both domestically and internationally is on track.”

Redstone said ViacomCBS’ collection of traditional media assets — its CBS broadcast network, cable networks including Comedy Central and MTV — provides the company with an opportunity to retain its target audience even when reaching young people. cord cutters via its streaming service, Paramount+. The strength of the business, she said, is in its content, evoking her late father Sumner Redstone’s famous phrase about content as “king”.

As Paramount+ emerges as a central focus for the company, Redstone said ViacomCBS no longer sees itself as an “arms dealer,” selling movies and TV shows to other streaming services. Instead, it focuses its resources internally. So while his hit Paramount Network TV show “Yellowstone” could air on NBCUniversal’s Peacock, his spin-off, “1883,” will air on Paramount+.

“There’s a definite shift in the business now that we’re creating content for our platform,” Redstone said.

Redstone, which through National Amusements operates movie theaters, defended ViacomCBS’s strategy of showing movies simultaneously in theaters and at home. She called it a “false narrative” that such a day-and-date release strategy is detrimental to the box office, citing the success of “Paw Patrol: The Movie.”

“We were able to do a bigger marketing campaign than any campaign we could have ever done if it was a single theatrical release,” Redstone said. “As a result, we’ve actually tripled, from Paramount’s perspective, the box office that we expected to do and, at the same time, we’ve brought in hundreds of thousands of subscribers to…Paramount+.”

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Reporting by Dawn Chmielewski in Los Angeles; Editing by Lisa Shumaker

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