The saga at HUM continues

With a second straight year of losses and fall in revenue, things are still not as bad as they could be

After a full year of waiting, the HUM Network has finally released their annual report for the financial year 2019-20. A glance at the report might indicate that the network delayed releasing the report for so long because it shows how the company has now faced a second consecutive year of straight losses and a lower revenue than before. However, things are not always what they seem, and while the HUM report is no glowing recommendation, it also shows that the company has managed to control some of the outrageous losses it could have had instead. To recall, Hum Network’s revenue reached a peak in 2017, at Rs4.6 billion. It began to decline to Rs3.9 billion in 2019, and then Rs3.7 billion in 2020. Net income also fell from a peak of Rs1 billion in 2017, to Rs729 million in 2018, to a loss of Rs536 million in 2019. Now, however, the loss stands only at Rs113 million - much smaller than what others had previously predicted.

What happened to this once glowing success of a company, that it should now be forced to be content with ‘at least the loss is not as bad as before?’ The story of the HUM Network over the past few years has been no less than any one of the many dramas that the network has gotten so good at putting up regularly.

To recap, Hum Network is entirely the brainchild of Sultana Siddiqui, who is the sister of investment banker and financier Jahangir Siddiqui. Hum network fundamentally is a product of three key factors: the first, her own career in media; second, her brother’s financing; and the third, former president Musharraf.

On the second point, Sultana joined Pakistan Television (PTV) as a producer in 1974 in SIndhi programming, before moving into Urdu programming in 1981. She then had a long career at the state-owned broadcaster (effectively the monopoly on entertainment in Pakistan until 1992).

This is where former president Musharraf comes in, whose government