The QVC Group, which owns shopping channels QVC and HSN, wants to expand beyond its linear cable and satellite TV channels to dominate TikTok, Facebook, Netflix, YouTube and other streaming platforms.
The QVC Group, which runs the QVC and HSN shopping channels, is laying off about 900 employees as part of its plan to consolidate and become a bigger player on social media and streaming platforms.
The company announced the moves on Thursday and posted the news on its investor relations website. The layoffs represent about 5% of the staff.
“We made the very difficult decision to eliminate a number of roles. In the U.S., this impacts approximately 900 team members across HSN, QVC US and our Global Shared Services,” the company said. “For many of these individuals, today will be their last day with QVC Group.”
Some employees will remain with the company for several months to help support its transition of the HSN broadcast hub from its current home in St. Petersburg, Florida, to QVC’s headquarters in West Chester, Pennsylvania, according to The QVC Group.
Liberty Interactive LLC, which is chaired by John Malone, created and spun off The QVC Group after acquiring HSN, formerly the Home Shopping Network, in 2017.
More about the restructuring
The HSN move to QVC’s headquarters is part of a restructuring begun in 2022, which has since included workforce reductions. At the end of 2024, the company had about 17,000 employees, according to a report filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The company’s 2024 net revenue of about $9 billion was down 4.8% from the previous year ($9.4 billion).
A focus on growing sales on social media platforms, including TikTok, is part of a strategy announced by CEO David Rawlinson in November to drive shopping online and create a “live social shopping content engine,” the company said at the time.
This step in the reorganization is “part of our strategy to grow by becoming a live social shopping company,” it says.
To that end, QVC launched a TikTok Shop in August and has seen more than 74,000 TikTok creators featuring QVC items in their posts. That has driven traffic to the TikTok Shop – and help increase social media impressions by more than 50% compared to a year ago, according to its 2024 annual report, filed Friday with the SEC.
The company has QVC+ and HSN+ streaming channels, as well as The Big Dish channel on Roku, and is developing streaming products for platforms such as Netflix and Hulu.
“We are fundamentally redefining who we are as a company and the role we play for our customers and in retail,” the company said in the report. “We enter this next phase of our turnaround with rigor and excitement.”
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