Mumbrellacast: Results season bloodbath, and the Qantas loyalty remake
Welcome to the Mumbrellacast, where we unpack the results of ARN, SCA, and Nine’s financial results, while Tim Burrowes packs for his Qantas flight.
It’s results season, and this week Nine, SCA, and ARN all reported the various fortunes of their companies. The market’s verdict hasn’t been pretty.
The night before it announced its financial results — and the very next business day after the retirement of chair Kerry Stokes — SCA’s board decided to dump boss Jeff Howard, who used to run Seven, and was very briefly CEO and managing director of the newly merged Seven/SCA. The timing of this decision sent quite a message to the market.
Former SCA boss John Kelly (back when they were “all about audio”) is now interim CEO of the company’s TV and audio divisions, and decided to use the SCA investor call as a gentle audition to shareholders for the top role.
He looks in with a good shot. After all, it was very clear which of the two companies involved in the Seven/SCA merger is doing the heavy lifting in financial terms, and it’s not the one that screens three hours of Home and Away each week …
While SCA has a robust audio business, ARN struggled over the 2025 calendar year, with net profits dropping by 68%, earnings down by 27%, and revenue falling by 10%.
They wrote the year off as one of “transition” and “transformation” and “transmogrification” (okay, they might not have used that last term), with their new(ish) CEO Michael Stephenson stacking the executive team with his old Nine colleagues, expanding out the business focus, and moving away from being reliant on audio. Like Nine, they are an ‘entertainment’ company now.
Meanwhile Nine is fairly good shape at the moment, although — like ARN — it also preferred to look forward. It makes sense, given it has recently shed a radio network, bought an out-of-home company, and has big plans to license its publishing content to train AI large language models. But will it pay a premium price for the NRL rights again? Matt Stanton said only if the price is right — we tend to think he has to pay whatever the league asks for, or risk falling way behind Seven as the home of true blue, fair dinkum Aussie sports, mate.
And speaking of true blue fair dinkum Aussies, Qantas has unveiled a huge shakeup of the country’s biggest loyalty scheme. Behind the scenes, though, the airline is also working on a major overhaul of its Loyalty marketing, dividing its strategy and agency management from its day-to-day campaign execution.
Qantas Loyalty generated $2.863 billion in revenue in FY25, and frequent flyers has 18 million members, so this is a big deal.
Tim Burrowes is one of those 18 million members, and — as he reveals during the podcast — he is quite obsessive about squeezing every possible benefit out of them, even if it means booking flights to New Zealand at 1am in order to qualify for certain perks. I’ll let him explain it on the podcast.
Get the latest episode every Wednesday.
