B1 TV Channel

B1 TV Channel SRL, the operator of the Bucharest-based all-news television station B1 TV, reported revenue of 15.73 million lei (€3.10 million) for 2025, down 34.9% on 2024, and swung from a net profit of 5.17 million lei (€1.04 million) in 2024 to a net loss of 2.91 million lei (€574,966) in 2025. That is a 156% deterioration in the bottom line in a single year. Average headcount fell 2.6% to 149, the third consecutive year of staff reductions, and shareholders’ equity dropped by more than a third. B1 TV is one of Romania’s established all-news television channels, though it now trails the larger news channels in audience share. In 2025 it stopped making money.

The headline most of the Romanian trade press chose for 2025 was the resolution of the channel’s long-running shareholder war. The data underneath that headline reads differently: a news broadcaster whose revenue has nearly halved from its 2019–2020 peak, whose cash reserves collapsed from 3.56 million lei (€715,848) at the end of 2024 to 109,965 lei (€21,694) at the end of 2025, and which now operates on equity worth less than two years of its own losses, in a market where its audience share trails behind its three direct competitors.

B1 TV Channel: key financial indicators 2024–2025

Source: B1 TV Channel SRL, financial data filed with the Romanian Ministry of Finance, as displayed in the RisCo company report dated 29 May 2026 (single-entity unconsolidated accounts). Fiscal code (CUI): 27759259; Trade Register number: J2010011662407. Lei figures are the filed accounts; euro conversions use the annual reference rates shown in the report (5.069 lei/€ for 2025, 4.9743 lei/€ for 2024).

B1 TV began broadcasting in 2001 as a generalist channel and converted to an all-news format in 2011. The operating company was registered in November 2010 and is classified under CAEN code 6020, television programming and broadcasting. For most of its history the company was held in two equal 50% stakes, by businessman George Constantin Păunescu (born 1938, father of film director and producer Bobby Păunescu) and by Sorin Oancea, the former director of the rival news station Antena 3 and B1 TV’s administrator and general manager. From August 2022 the two camps were locked in an open conflict: Bobby Păunescu, acting for his father, repeatedly attempted to take control of the company, filing an insolvency petition in December 2022 that the court rejected in January 2023 on the ground that he was not the legal administrator, and pressing a separate action to exclude Oancea as a shareholder. The Păunescu side publicised an ANAF (tax authority) inspection report alleging VAT irregularities and accused Oancea of embezzlement and tax evasion; Oancea rejected the claims and the Trade Register repeatedly confirmed him as administrator. Much of this was fought out on air, with Bobby Păunescu attacking Oancea through programmes on the competing channel Realitatea Plus.

That conflict was formally settled in early 2025, and it is the single most important governance event behind the 2025 accounts. In February 2025 Romania’s audiovisual regulator, the CNA, approved a new ownership structure: Sorin Oancea retained 50%, George Constantin Păunescu’s stake was reduced to 40%, and a new minority holder, Luminița Elena Oancea (Sorin Oancea’s wife), took 10%. A second change followed in June 2025, when Bobby George Marius Păunescu formally replaced his father as holder of the 40% stake; the CNA approved the transfer on 17 June 2025 but issued a warning letter because it had been carried out without the prior regulatory approval normally required. The resulting structure, Sorin Oancea 50%, Bobby Păunescu 40% and Luminița Elena Oancea 10%, is the “3 individual shareholders, 0 legal-entity shareholders” recorded in the filing, and it leaves the Oancea side with a 60% combined holding. The company framed the February transaction as a move to stabilise the firm and allow it to operate normally after years of shareholder conflict. In practice it shifted effective control toward the Oancea side, which retained day-to-day management throughout the dispute.

A further change came at the end of the year. In early December 2025, Sorin Oancea announced that he was stepping down from the executive role and the administrator position he had held for 15 years, while keeping his shareholding. The decision was taken at a shareholders’ meeting on 27 November 2025, and from December the company’s new administrator is Rareș Aniță, B1 TV’s programme and sales director. Oancea said the move reflected a point at which he could no longer involve himself day to day at the same level while also pursuing personal projects. With the Oancea side still holding 60% of the shares, the change is a management handover rather than a transfer of control, but it ends the era in which the channel’s founder-generation manager also ran it.

Signals

Revenue nearly halved and the company fell into loss

The 2025 result is a step change. Sales fell from 24.16 million lei (€4.86 million) in 2024 to 15.73 million lei (€3.10 million) in 2025, a drop of almost 35%. Expenses, at 18.89 million lei (€3.73 million), barely moved from the prior year and now exceed sales by more than 3 million lei. The result was a net loss of 2.91 million lei (€574,966), against a 5.17 million-lei (€1.04 million) profit the year before.

The longer arc explains why this matters. B1 TV Channel earned strong profits in 2019 and 2020 (net profit of 10.95 million lei and 11.46 million lei respectively, on revenue near 27 million lei), then declined steadily: a small loss in 2022, a heavy 5.43 million-lei loss in 2023, a one-year recovery to profit in the 2024 election year, and now a loss again in 2025. Romanian news channels typically see revenue spike in election years from political advertising and heightened audience interest; 2024 was a double election year (parliamentary, plus the annulled and re-run presidential contest), and B1 TV’s 2024 figures reflect that bump. The 2025 collapse is in part the unwinding of that election-year inflation, but the absolute level, the lowest revenue since 2023, also points to a structurally weaker advertising base.

Cash reserves were almost entirely depleted

The most striking single line in the 2025 filing is cash. The company ended 2024 with 3.56 million lei (€715,848) on hand; it ended 2025 with 109,965 lei (€21,694). That is a 97% reduction. Receivables also fell, from 7.11 million lei to 6.41 million lei, while liabilities rose from 2.29 million lei to 3.34 million lei. A loss-making year, the disappearance of the cash buffer and rising liabilities together describe a company that funded its 2025 operating shortfall by running down its reserves. Equity fell in step, from 8.37 million lei (€1.68 million) to 5.45 million lei (€1.08 million), a 35% drop that corresponds closely to the year’s loss. The registered share capital of 880,200 lei is unchanged, so the equity decline is the accumulated effect of the loss rather than any capital action.

This is not, on the published single-entity data, an insolvency event: equity remains comfortably positive and the company is part of a group, so intra-group support may exist that the standalone filing does not capture. But it removes the margin for error. After 2025, B1 TV Channel has very little cash of its own and a thinner equity cushion than at any point since its loss-making 2023.

Headcount has fallen for a third year

Average employment dropped to 149 in 2025, from 153 in 2024 and 163 in 2023. The reductions are modest year on year but consistent, and they come from a workforce that stood at 168–170 in 2021–2022. The filing does not break newsroom staff out from administrative and technical functions, so it is not possible to say from the data alone how much of the cut fell on journalism. But a news channel that is losing money, has spent down its cash and is trimming staff is, structurally, a newsroom under cost pressure.

A news channel that runs behind its rivals, but grew in 2025

B1 TV competes in Romania’s crowded all-news segment against larger rivals including România TV, Antena 3 CNN, Realitatea Plus and Digi24. Full-year 2025 audience data placed B1 TV behind all four of those channels, with a much smaller average national audience. Within that weak position there was one bright spot: in the 2025 prime-time rankings B1 TV was one of only two news channels to grow, rising roughly 50% to an average of about 52,000 viewers from around 35,000 the year before. The competitive picture matters commercially, because in Romanian television news, advertising, political visibility and campaign-year spending remain closely tied to audience scale, and B1 TV’s smaller audience caps its share of all three. The 2025 ownership settlement may reduce the instability created by the shareholder conflict, but it does not by itself resolve the channel’s weaker competitive standing.

The channel’s editorial identity has also been in flux. B1 TV’s own self-description emphasises essential information delivered with a relaxed, “equidistant” approach, and for years it was regarded as one of the more open news channels in the Romanian market. In May 2025, around the re-run presidential election, a long-serving B1 TV host, Tudor Mușat, left the channel and publicly framed his departure as a disagreement with a change of direction; Oancea, then still manager, described the shift as an adaptation to changing television-news consumption habits. Some media observers raised concerns that the channel might move toward the “sovereigntist”, anti-Western register associated with rivals such as România TV and Realitatea Plus, and several figures connected to B1 TV have been linked to the far-right AUR camp. How far that reorientation actually goes is contested rather than settled, and it is one of the open questions the new management inherits.

What to watch in 2026

The unanswered question is whether B1 TV Channel can return to profit, or even to revenue stability, in a non-election year. The 2025 numbers show a company that has lost roughly a third of its revenue in twelve months, fallen into loss, run its cash down to near zero and reduced staff for a third straight year, while finally resolving the ownership dispute that had destabilised it since 2022. None of those signals on its own is fatal, the company is not insolvent and remains part of a wider group, but together they describe a news broadcaster with almost no financial buffer heading into a year without an electoral advertising boost.

Four things will shape the 2026 reading. First, whether 2025’s revenue collapse was a one-off correction from the 2024 election peak or the new baseline, because the expense line has not adjusted downward to match. Second, whether the rebuilt 50/40/10 ownership structure holds, or whether the underlying Păunescu–Oancea tensions, and the unresolved tax and embezzlement allegations aired during the conflict, resurface in court. Third, how B1 TV operates under its new administrator, Rareș Aniță, after Sorin Oancea’s December 2025 step-back from the executive role he had held for 15 years, even as the Oancea side retains a 60% majority. And fourth, whether the channel can build on its 2025 audience growth and close the gap on România TV, Antena 3 CNN, Realitatea Plus and Digi24, in a segment where political advertising and political alignment, rather than subscription or full-price journalism, remain the main revenue logic. The 2025 filing does not answer any of those questions. It does establish that, stripped of the election-year boost and the shareholder drama, B1 TV Channel’s underlying business lost money in 2025 and has very little room left to absorb another bad year.