Posted
The current owner of the Canal group might retire from business on February 17, the day of the bicentenary of his family business.
Vincent Bolloré is, at 69, notably the owner of CNews, C8 and Canal+.
AFP
Vincent Bolloré, retired on February 17? The date, the day of the bicentenary of the family business, was to mark the withdrawal from business of the industrialist and media mogul, but this now seems very hypothetical, as there are still many issues to settle.
“Today, I finish giving up my position as adviser, following having been a leader until three years ago. My family agreed to continue this industrial saga. She will represent the seventh generation,” said Vincent Bolloré on January 19 as part of a senatorial commission of inquiry into media concentration.
“I will leave my place (…) when we celebrate the group’s bicentenary”, added the billionaire, 70 years old in April, at the head of an empire with one foot in industry (Bolloré group in transport and logistics) and the other in the media (Vivendi).
However, the bicentenary will finally be celebrated twice: the first time on Thursday in Ergué-Gabéric, near Quimper, where the head office of the company, Compagnie de l’Odet, is located, then in July, with great fanfare several hundred people.
But the prospect of the handover seems to be receding as the deadline approaches: it will be “postponed” due to several important files to be managed, BFM Business said last week.
A connoisseur of the Bolloré universe reminds AFP for his part that the businessman “has started a process of transferring responsibilities” to his children, “which is largely achieved but not completely”.
His 42-year-old son Yannick, CEO of Havas since 2013, became chairman of Vivendi’s supervisory board in 2018, while his younger brother Cyrille, 36, took over the reins of the Bolloré group in March 2019.
Control Tower
“It is impossible to know when he will decide to fully realize (his withdrawal). Anyway, even if he realizes it, he will always keep the control tower of the Compagnie de l’Odet” which he chairs, the same source believes.
This holding, piloted by the only billionaire, is at the head of the Bolloré empire, shaped in forty years through acquisitions and which now totals around 80,000 employees and 24 billion euros in revenue.
Vincent Bolloré likes to recall that in the early 1980s, when he got down to the recovery of the family stationery then in difficulty, it “employed just under 800 people” for a turnover of 20 million euros.
Since then, it has developed in the media – sometimes at the cost of brutal changes -, between audiovisual (Canal+ group and its channels C8 and CNews or Europe 1 radio), press (Prisma Media, the leading group of magazines in France, the JDD, Paris-Match, Prisa in Spain), /communication (Havas), publishing (Editis) or telecoms (Telecom Italia).
Facing the senators, Vincent Bolloré denied any political objective in his strategy of acquisitions in the media, while his detractors denounce in particular a news channel CNews which would have become the mouthpiece of his conservative opinions.
Informal adviser
“He has no title but we know that he influences major strategic decisions”, underlines a close source, for whom the businessman will hold this role of informal adviser to the group “for an indefinite time” which will depend of “the evolution of problems”.
Several burning issues remain to be completed: acquiring the entire capital of the Lagardère group – an operation whose start is expected by the beginning of March -, preventing the American investment fund KKR from gaining a foothold in Telecom Italia – of which Vivendi is the largest shareholder – and convince the Spanish government to let Vivendi take nearly 30% of the capital of the media group Prisa, which owns the daily El Pais, once morest 9.9% currently.
Not to mention the planned sale of the group’s logistics branch in Africa, undermined by several legal proceedings, which he intends to carry out.
“I realized that the transmission was less easy than I imagined,” he admitted recently in the book “Dictionary of lovers of business and entrepreneurs”. “The management functions must be handed over and consequently abandoned. At these moments, we see the gaze of others which, of course, turns away to go towards the new power – this is very natural but always a little painful.
(AFP)