Paramount is For Sale at the Right Price, but Finding Buyers in Current Conditions Could Be Tricky

It’s hard to sell a product that no one has money to buy. Paramount Global’s controlling shareholder Shari Redstone is finding that out the hard way. According to a report from CNBC, Redstone is and has been willing to sell Paramount to the highest bidder for years, but finding a partner has been incredibly tough.

• Paramount Global would engage in sale or merger talks at the right price.
• The company owns Paramount+, Pluto TV, and CBS, as well as a host of live sports rights and popular franchises.
• Paramount explored a sale of BET this year, but couldn’t find a buyer to meet its pricing needs.

Can We Make a Deal?

The problem for Redstone and Paramount is that current market conditions are not favorable for a sale of Paramount. When CBS merged with Viacom in 2019, the new company had a market valuation of $30 billion. Four years and one name change later, Paramount Global’s capitalization has sunk to $7.7 billion, and it still loses millions of dollars per year from its streamers Paramount+ and Pluto TV.

The company has been exploring ways to potentially streamline its operations by selling itself in parts. It turned down a $3 billion offer to sell its premium cable channel Showtime, preferring instead to merge its content onto Paramount+. Paramount also engaged in sale talks over the summer for BET, but never got an offer that induced the company to pull the trigger.

The trouble is, the other legacy media companies in Hollywood who might have an interest in Paramount Global are all facing the same struggles as that company; namely, they’re trying to make their streaming services profitable and adjust to a marketplace where their cable channels are no longer huge revenue drivers. That’s especially true of Warner Bros. Discovery and Disney, to say nothing of the fact that a potential acquisition of Paramount by either of these two companies would create significant regulatory hurdles.

Tech to the Rescue?

Tech firms like Amazon, Apple, and Google’s parent company Alphabet are all large enough to acquire Paramount without undue financial stress. Adding Paramount’s assets to Prime Video would give the streamer a large package of NFL games to place alongside streams of “Thursday Night Football,” and the works of Taylor Sheridan would bring their audience along to any other streaming platform that acquired their rights.

“We believe Paramount Global is too small to win the streaming wars, but it is bite-size enough to be acquired by a larger streaming competitor for its deep library of film and TV content, as well as its sports rights and news assets,” said Laura Martin, an analyst at Needham & Co. in a note to clients this month.

But whether any of these companies would want to acquire all of Paramount Global is very much unanswered. None of these firms has owned a broadcast TV network before, and if one did buy Paramount it would immediately be faced with the question of what to do with CBS amidst a faltering pay TV market.

For now, Paramount has to wait out the market, and hope for a shift in opinions regarding its assets. As things currently stand, that’s the best chance the company has of being sold in the near future, though it’s hardly an enviable position to be stuck in.