Seven/SCA boss: more job cuts ahead, but he's betting $25 billion on trust over talent

Rohan Lund is not about to tell you FY26 was a triumph. 

Revenue down 4.5%. EBITDA down almost 16%. Net profit after tax gutted by more than half. If you're looking for a chief executive spinning straw into gold on an earnings call, Southern Cross Media Group's boss is the wrong man to ask.

But he's not exactly wringing his hands, either. Talking to Mediaweek about the merged Seven/SCA group's first full-year result, Lund lands somewhere between the two - neither bullish nor Pollyanna-eyed about a business still absorbing the biggest deal in Australian media in a decade.

"I was extremely impressed by the audio business," Lund said. "I think radio is such a resilient industry, and John Kelly has done a terrific job with that business."

It's audio, not television, doing the heavy lifting in these numbers. While TV revenue fell 6.6% to $1.25 billion - in a market down 9.9% - audio grew 1.4% to $429.9 million, with digital audio revenue up 14.3%, enough to outrun the decline in broadcast radio for the first time. That crossover point is exactly what Lund wants to replicate across the rest of the group.

"I think what's exciting is looking at the transition where listener growth exceeded the decline in the traditional radio business," he said. "I think that's a significant moment, and it's obviously something I want to replicate in television."

Ask him what "replicating LiSTNR" actually means and he doesn't reach for a slogan - he reaches for a number. Seven News, he says, racks up roughly a billion video streams a month across Google, Meta and TikTok, an audience the group hasn't properly monetised because it's been thinking of its digital footprint as 7Plus and little else.

"We haven't really captured the full opportunity of what's happening with Seven content, which is, I think, what LiSTNR has done such a good job of," Lund said.

The cultural reset, again

If there's one idea Lund keeps circling back to, it's culture. Not as a throwaway line for the annual report, but as the thing he says actually explains the numbers. 

The group has restructured around "total television" - collapsing the old broadcast-versus-digital divide into a single conversation - partly because of the 17.5 million registered viewers now watching Seven content, and partly because, in Lund's telling, digital had been treated as a sideshow for too long.

"I want people putting digital at the core of the conversation, not something we do on the side," he said. "It's also about recognising how many homes have connected TV sets and are already consuming us."

He describes the months after the merger in blunter terms than most chief executives would risk during a chat with a journalist. "There was anxiety in the first few months of the merger, but now there's confidence across the organisation, and our people feel the momentum," Lund said. "It's been a cultural reset over the last few months. New values, new purpose, and getting the whole organisation to understand that that digital opportunity of $25 billion a year is worth chasing - and we deserve it."

It's a phrase he returns to more than once across the conversation, in slightly different forms: staff who can "feel" the shift, a strategy "everyone understands and buys into," an organisation that finished the year strongly and is already up in July, in a market still going backwards.

READ MORE: Why Seven may be the real winner as SCA revenue falls 4.5%

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The costs - and the redundancies

None of that comes free. SCA has already locked in $30 million of its targeted annualised merger synergies, a year ahead of schedule, as it works towards total savings of between $145 million and $150 million.

Pressed on whether "cost-cutting" is code for job losses, Lund doesn't dodge it.

"I don't really look at it that way, but I do believe it's inevitable," he said. "You'll see the group continue to move its cost base lower. And if we want to compete against the digital companies, it's got to be lean and agile enough to do that."

He's careful to frame it as standard operating procedure rather than a crisis measure. “It will always be done respectfully. I think every executive everywhere in the world, and every business, probably thinks that way.”

On Kyle, Karl, and who Seven/SCA actually wants to be

Asked about talent like Kyle Sandilands and Karl Stefanovic - both, in different ways, symbols of the personality-led model Lund's "trust" pitch sits in contrast to - he doesn't take the bait to relitigate either saga. He steers straight back to brand.

"For niche audiences, those products present opportunities for niche presenters," Lund said. "But for our group, we want to be Australia's most trusted media company, and we want to create the most trusted news platforms. And our news is growing... I think the trust is a big aspect of that."

It's the closest thing to a thesis statement in the whole conversation: not the biggest audience, not the loudest voice - the most trusted one. Whether that ambition survives contact with a still-shrinking TV ad market and a cost-cutting program with years left to run is the story Mediaweek will be following well past this result. 

For now, only 14% of advertisers buy across both audio and television, which by Lund's own admission is either an embarrassment or the biggest low-hanging fruit in Australian media, depending on the day you catch him.

Either way, July was up. He'll take that.