Vivendi renounces Editis to allow its merger with Lagardère

The French media giant Vivendi announced on Thursday July 28 that it was going to study a project to sell its subsidiary Editis, number two in publishing in France with the houses Plon, La Découverte, Bordas, Le Cherche Midi and Nathan. Objective: to avoid competition problems posed by its merger with the Lagardère group, owner of the French leader Hachette.

“Vivendi plans to carry out this operation mainly through the distribution of Editis shares to Vivendi shareholders and their simultaneous listing on the Euronext market in Paris”, the band said in a statement. This project, which remains subject to the acceptance of the European Commission, aims to allow Vivendi to take real control of Lagardère, and its nugget Hachette, the world’s third largest publishing group.

Already a majority shareholder of Lagardère after the success of its public offer filed at the beginning of the year, Vivendi currently exercises only 23% of the voting rights pending authorization of the takeover of the group by the competition authorities. However, the prospect of a marriage between Hachette and Editis, two leading French players, has been causing concern for the entire publishing sector for months.

If the project is realized, the Bolloré group, at the helm of Vivendi, of which it owns 28% of the shares, also plans to sell the shares received from the publisher to a new reference shareholder, said Vivendi.

Vivendi initially wanted to keep Editis, which it had acquired at the end of 2018 for 900 million euros. But he now plans to give it up, in order to “to ensure the sustainability and integrity of Editis”which federates 53 houses in the fields of literature, education and reference, while allowing Vivendi “to move forward in its merger project” with Lagardère, said the chairman of the management board of the group Arnaud de Puyfontaine during a conference call with journalists.