KUALA LUMPUR – Kenanga Research is positive on Media Prima Bhd’s outlook on the back of the media and entertainment group’s recent partnership with over-the-top (OTT) media services WeTV and iQiYi, which will positively impact digital ad sales and content distribution across Asia.
Media Prima had also rebranded ntv7 to Didik TV to spur higher viewership, and the performance of its home-shopping segment has been stable thus far.
Kenanga Research said Media Prima’s partnership with WeTV and iQiYi entailed the group licencing out its programmes to the OTTs, enabling them to stream content on their respective platforms and allowing the group to sell advertising slots in the digital space solely on their licenced content.
“This opens up another avenue for the group to sell ad slots as more titles are licenced out to these OTTs result in more ad slots available for the group to sell,” the brokerage firm said in a research note today.
Media Prima will distribute its content to WeTV and iQiYi, and, for the latter, 1,000 hours of premium content is expected to be licenced out by year-end.
“We believe the growth in content distribution may give an edge to its loss-making content creation segment to hit break-even as 80% of the segment’s revenue comes from content distribution,” said Kenanga Research.
Kenanga Research believes Media Prima’s lowest viewing channel ntv7, which has been rebranded to education channel Didik TV, may gain traction, thus bumping up its viewership.
Didik TV is a collaboration between Media Prima and the Education Ministry.
On Media Prima’s home-shopping segment, Kenanga Research said the performance of Wowshop was flat from the fourth quarter of 2020 to the first quarter of 2021, despite the first quarter being the group’s seasonally weakest quarter.
“Along with their e-commerce and mobile commerce multi-platform strategy showing positive results, we expect Wowshop to remain sustainable post-pandemic as consumers are adapting and becoming more dependent on digital shopping,” said Kenanga Research.
The brokerage firm upgraded Media Prima to outperform call from underperform with a higher target price of RM0.755 from RM0.365. – Bernama, April 16, 2021
