The prospect of the acquisition of Hachette (Lagardère) by Editis (Vivendi), which will make the group of Vincent Bolloré a giant of the sector, arouses strong concerns.
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A plain trio to attack Vivendi’s OPA on Lagardère announced by Vincent Bolloré, and its corollary, the fusion between Hachette Book and Editis – the numbers one and two of the French edition. The Senate Committee on Media Concentration in France has expanded its field of investigation to publishing.
Audition on Wednesday, February 16, Antoine Gallimard, the CEO of the Madrigall Group (Gallimard, Flammarion …), who spoke on behalf of the National Publishing Union (SNE), Guillaume Husson, General Delegate of the Librairie Union French (SLF) and Christophe Hardy, President of the Society of Letters (SGDL) denounced the deleterious effect of such a rapprochement, which should still, to obtain the approval of the European Commission, translate into multiple Cessions of publishing houses, especially in the school, the extracurricular or the paperback.
“Such a merger is ineencourable,” said Antoine Gallimard, because in terms of competition “an entity bringing together Hachette and Editis would represent 33% of the number of copies, 50% of the broadcast and 60% of The [logistics] distribution of books “. Under oath, in front of the senators, while Madrigall is number three of the edition, he also said: “I do not try to be a number two. (…) What interests me is the catalogs, I do not Do not want to become an empire, far from it. “” It is desirable that the number one and the number two do not merge, “he insisted.
” Compressor roll “
With the current market configuration and the regulation by the single price of the book, the “[French] situation is still relatively valuable compared to abroad.” “It would not be necessary for a huge mass to break all that,” added the CEO of Madrigall. As for the possibility of recovering certain assets, if the merger materialized, he did not hide his interest in the school edition. He unveiled “Having been interested in a moment by Haitier, who had then been acquired by Hachette” and conceded: “I will look at” if the possibility of assignment in the school edition was present.
For Christophe Hardy, the justification for Vivendi – consider that a dwarf next to the Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft – do not convince, since they are not publishers. “The dwarf is the authors,” he said, stating that “the already unbalanced relations between the authors and the publishers” would be even more so, since they weaken “any ability to negotiate collectively or individually” with this mastodon.
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