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| Photo courtesy of Inquirer and ABS-CBN |
ABS-CBN Corp. will have to do some belt-tightening starting August if they will not be able to secure their new franchise or even just a provisional franchise just to get back on air the soonest possible time.
It would be a very hard decision to make but they cannot afford to sustain their 11,000 employees in the coming months without its operation on air.
The network's president and CEO Carlo Katigbak revealed during the Senate hearing on its franchise renewal on Tuesday.
“I’m afraid that if we don’t go back on air soon, we may start a retrenchment process in August,” said Katigbak.
Katigbak said they remain committed to their promise that their 11,000 workers will still have jobs for at least three months despite their losses in substantial revenues after they were ordered to shut down on May 5,
"We felt it would be very, very painful to put our employees out on the street without them having an idea as to how they can continue earning a living and continue to feed their families," the ABS-CBN CEO confessed.
However, Katigbak added that they cannot keep their commitment in an "open-ended," status due to the network's financial constraints since going off-air.
"We continue to lose a substantial amount of money every month," he said.
Katigbak is counting on Congress to give it a provisional franchise just to get back on air and stop the bleeding. ABS-CBN is losing as much as P35 million a day from advertising.
“If a provisional franchise in October is the quickest way for us to go back on air then we accept that, with the hopes that Congress will continue hearings so we can hopefully secure our 25-year franchise,” he said.
“We need to do this (franchise) so we can again start earning revenues so we can continue paying salaries of our employees,” he added.
Shares of ABS-CBN Corp. is falling for the second straight day since resuming trading on Monday.
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