Carlo Katigbak’s Last Emergency

On Wednesday (September 15, 2026), ABS-CBN announced that it had been “a difficult year for the content industry,” blamed the Middle East conflict, high inflation and low economic growth for weaker advertising and consumer spending, and said it had made “the difficult decision to implement a retrenchment program” covering “around 200 people or seven percent of the company's workforce.” It would manage the process, the statement said, the way it always had, “with compassion for our Kapamilya.”

Twenty-seven days earlier, delivering the president's report at the company's annual stockholders' meeting on August 19, Carlo Katigbak had opened by telling the people who own ABS-CBN that “these are not normal times for your company,” that the crises had arrived one after another, and that most of them had been “existential in nature.” Then he set out what the company owed and to whom. It owed shareholders “a fair return on your capital.” And then the sentence reached past everyone in the room: “We owe it to our banks, our employees, our partners to make good on all our obligations to them.”

At a town hall meeting with employees on September 15, Katigbak said this would be the last retrenchment under his leadership.

For people who have worked at ABS-CBN since 2020, last is a difficult word, because the cutting has been continuous and every round has arrived described as necessary and, by implication, terminal.

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Six years earlier, at the annual meeting of September 24, 2020, held online because the company had just been forced off the air, Katigbak told shareholders that “we have had to retrench nearly 5,000 employees,” that programming had been cut to save money, and that many of those staying had volunteered to take pay cuts. He thanked the people leaving for the years they had given. He thanked the people staying for enduring the sacrifice.

Then he reached for the form his company knew best, telling shareholders that in the teleseryes the protagonist goes through “unendurable suffering” and always emerges better, stronger and more successful, and that while the teleseryes are fiction, they mirror the realities of life. On that logic he made a commitment: “we will come out of this crisis a better, stronger, and more successful company.”

That speech begins a six-year argument, delivered once a year to the same audience, about a recovery that is always approaching.

In July 2021, reporting revenues of P21.4 billion and a net loss of P13.5 billion, he called the figures “symbols of the pain that we are going through,” and quoted Eugenio “Gabby” Lopez III, the chairman who had stepped back from the company in 2018, on how “profit is like air,” something a company needs to survive but not the reason it lives. In July 2022 he was more specific, telling shareholders that “a return to profitability is possible in the near term.” By May 2023 the language had softened into weather: the climb was still uphill, but “the light at the end of the tunnel has become sharper and brighter.”

At the virtual annual stockholders meeting of ABS-CBN in August 2026 the forecast changed shape. “We recognize that we are not yet where we need to be,” he said, before describing recovery as momentum rather than arrival and adding that he believed with “complete confidence that the momentum you are seeing will carry us through to profitability.” No date attached to it this time. What he offered instead was that the next chapter would be about proving the company could rebuild itself strong enough to serve for generations.

Two days before he said it, ABS-CBN had disclosed its first-half results. Consolidated revenues had fallen 17 percent to P6.88 billion, advertising revenue had dropped from P3.8 billion to P2.33 billion, the net loss had more than doubled to P1.83 billion, and EBITDA had gone from positive P568 million to negative P498 million, which is the point at which a business stops generating cash from its operations before interest and depreciation are counted at all.

The company that went into the shutdown of 2020 employed 11,071 people across its various categories. By the end of 2021, after the great retrenchment, ABS-CBN and its subsidiaries counted 5,870 regular, project and program-based employees and independent contractors. By the end of 2023 that was 5,279. The restructuring that followed the collapse of the Sky Cable sale to PLDT took it to 4,022 by the end of 2024, and a further round brought it to 3,646 at the end of 2025.

What fell fastest was permanent employment. Regular employees numbered 3,899 at the end of 2021 and 2,009 four years later, while the non-regular population, having bottomed at 1,411 in 2024, rose again to 1,637 in 2025 as live events and concerts expanded and independent contractor roles grew from 668 to 849. The company did not only become smaller. It became a place where a shrinking share of the people working in it hold permanent jobs, 55 percent at the end of last year against 66 percent in 2021.

Set that against July 2022, when Katigbak told shareholders that the biggest priority was ensuring ABS-CBN kept telling excellent stories, and that this was the reason for “keeping our best talent across the organization,” which he specified as the “creative, performing, production, journalistic, and managerial” ranks. Regular headcount stood at 3,867 that year. Within three years it had fallen by nearly half. In August he counted “four thousand dedicated Kapamilyas,” a figure that reaches 4,000 only by including artists and contractors alongside employees.

During the 2020 retrenchment ABS-CBN paid roughly P1.1 billion in separation benefits, part of a much larger set of one-time provisions taken that year. Six years on, the parent company's audited accounts for 2025 record that its pension obligation still includes P874 million payable to retrenched and separated employees, down only P70 million from the P944 million owed at the end of 2024.

The fund that would ordinarily pay them is close to empty. According to the quarterly filings of ABS-CBN, the group's defined benefit obligation as of June 30, 2026 stood at P3.53 billion against plan assets of P61.3 million, coverage of under two percent. The parent's plan assets had fallen to P69.85 million at the end of 2025 from P141.85 million a year earlier, after P1.007 billion was paid out of the retirement fund during the year. For 2026 the group expects to contribute P60.4 million to it.

So the 200 people leaving this month join a line. Ahead of them are colleagues separated in earlier rounds who are still owed money more than a year later, and the obligation to all of them sits against a fund holding roughly one-sixtieth of what it covers. Separation pay, in practice, now comes out of operating cash, and ABS-CBN held P1.31 billion of that at the end of June against P8.64 billion in loans falling due within 12 months. These are the obligations the president's report promised to make good on.

On August 12, ABS-CBN signed subscription agreements for P6 billion in new equity. I&C Holdings Corp., a private investment holding company that invests for long-term turnarounds, takes P3.5 billion. Crème Investment Corporation, Mantes Corporation and Presta Holdings Company Inc., representing three branches of the Lopez family, take P2.2 billion between them. Lopez Inc. takes P300 million. “This substantial investment is a vote of confidence in ABS-CBN,” said Mark Lopez, the media company’s chairman.

All that money is not in the company yet. Only about P2 billion of it has reached the company. I&C Holdings, led by non-Lopez family members, has funded part of its P3.5 billion and has set conditions before releasing the rest, and Crème and Mantes, two of the three family branches, have paid in their subscriptions.

The P6 billion is meant to purchase newly issued shares that will not exist until shareholders approve an increase in authorized capital stock at a special meeting on September 30 and the Securities and Exchange Commission approves it afterward.

Until then the cash sits on the wrong side of the balance sheet. Money received against a subscription before the shares are issued is carried as a deposit for future subscription or an advance from stockholders, and it counts as a liability rather than equity unless a specific set of regulatory conditions has been met. ABS-CBN's June 30 accounts already show how that looks, with P500.4 million of advances from stockholders received in 2025 for a proposed equity investment, the conversion of which remains subject to discussion and regulatory approvals.

The P6 billion rescue funds are destined for working capital, strengthening the balance sheet and general corporate purposes, and the company has told the exchange the public float will be diluted.

It is arriving into a balance sheet that needs all of it. At the end of June, current liabilities exceeded current assets by P14.2 billion, worse than the P12.4 billion gap six months earlier, and shareholders' equity had turned negative at P1.08 billion. The interim accounts still carry a material uncertainty over the company's ability to continue as a going concern. Six billion pesos repairs the equity line and gives the refinancing talks with the banks something to point at. None of it changes what the business earns next year.

ABS-CBN has said how many people are leaving and has not said where they work. That distinction is not administrative, because who goes describes the company management believes it is building, and news, entertainment, films, music, digital, sales, technical operations and corporate functions are not interchangeable.

There are places to look. Cory Vidanes, the chief operating officer for broadcast, told the August meeting that a new Pinoy Big Brother season is coming in partnership with GMA Network and that the show is moving to a house that “will be more cost efficient for us.” Gandang Gabi Vice, which stars Vice Ganda, returns on GMA and iWant. Grant Orbeta, who heads real estate and development, said that after the sold parcel is turned over to Ayala Land by mid-2027, every operating unit based in Quezon City “will hold office in the Eugenio Lopez Communications Center and the Gina Lopez Building.” A compound folded into two buildings, and co-productions in which the partner supplies the facility and part of the crew, are where production and technical redundancies come from.

One further detail sits underneath the announcement. Retrenchment under the Labor Code is a process applied to regular employees, and the 200 employees being let go this 2026, measured against the 2,009 regular employees on the books at the end of 2025 is closer to 10 percent than to 7. Seven percent works only against a base that also counts project and program-based staff, which is a choice about how to present the number rather than about how many people are going.

Carlo Katigbak is the son of a cousin of Eugenio “Geny” Lopez Jr., who is the father of Eugenio “Gabby” Lopez III. Carlo and Gabby are third-degree cousins through Carlo's mother's side and Gabby's father's side. Other cousins in the different business units of the Lopez conglomerate include Martin Lopez, Federico “Piki” Lopez, Rafael “Raffy” Lopez.

For much of 2026, those cousins have been fighting each other. Since early 2026 the third generation has been in an open contest over control of Lopez Inc. and the listed companies beneath it, carried out through competing public statements, board actions and the courts, with Piki Lopez on one side and a majority of the cousins, led by Gabby Lopez, on the other. The broadcaster Katigbak runs sits under that holding company, which means that for the year in which ABS-CBN most needed a decision about its future, the decision belonged to a family that could not agree on who had the authority to make one. Whichever cousin side prevailed would control the company he runs.

Carlo Katigbak, therefore, is not a professional manager hired to do difficult things to someone else's company. He has spent six years reducing the family broadcaster while the family spent much of the same period fighting over control of everything else it owns, and the P2.2 billion now coming from Crème, Mantes and Presta is his own relatives putting money back into the institution he has been dismantling in order to keep it alive.

The man he quoted in 2021 on profit being like air is no longer part of that arrangement. On August 10, 2026, Gabby Lopez sold his family branch's stake in Lopez Inc. to Ramon S. Ang.

In August, Katigbak framed the period as a test of whether “In the Service of the Filipino” was “just a compelling slogan that served us well in good times” or “the genuine reason for our existence, proven because we embraced it in impossible times.” He proposed that test himself, and it applies to the constituency his own sentence named alongside the banks and the partners.

On September 30 the shareholders vote on the capital increase that has to pass before any of the P6 billion exists. The parent's books still carry P874 million owed to employees let go the last time. The company has not said which divisions the 200 retrenched employees come from.