It holds number two in publishing in France and will acquire number one. But the billionaire Vincent Bolloré maintains the mystery about his plans for the book market, where he will have to avoid a dominant position. Vivendi’s main shareholder controls Editis, and is preparing to launch its takeover bid for Lagardère, the parent company of Hachette Livre.
One point is clear: keeping the current perimeter of these two rivals will not be authorized by the European competition authorities. “The presence of the two large groups would be around 80%” in certain sectors: “84% extracurricular, 74% school… In pocket literature, it would be around 65%. So it’s huge, ”detailed this week Antoine Gallimard, the boss of number three Madrigall, on France Inter.
“Nobody is in the head of Vincent Bolloré”
But Vincent Bolloré, experienced in acquisitions to grow what is often called an “empire”, will probably not let Brussels dictate the conditions for it. He will arrive, in all likelihood, with his proposals. Which ones? Kept in media silence, the publishers within Editis claim to be unaware of the intentions of their shareholder. “It’s a Vivendi subject,” said a source within the publishing group.
“Nobody is in Vincent Bolloré’s head,” Martine Prosper, secretary general of the National Book-Publishing Union CFDT, told AFP. “We know absolutely nothing. But we see that for the employees of the two groups, it is a distressing moment”. Between rumors and speculation, this sector which weighs more than three billion euros in turnover is eager to know what it will become.
The works of the two best sellers of in-game literature
Two scenarios seem possible. Vivendi could get rid of Editis to have the right to control Hachette Livre, owner of some of the most prestigious houses in Paris: Grasset, Calmann-Lévy, Stock, Fayard, Le Livre de poche, Larousse… The two best sellers of literature French, Guillaume Musso and Virginie Grimaldi, as well as the publisher of the Asterix superstar, Albert René, would thus fall into the hands of Vincent Bolloré.
The latter clearly likes the international dimension of Hachette, less than a third of whose turnover is made in France. The businessman put forward this globalized cultural ambition in front of the senators who are investigating concentration in the media. “A group capable of proposing to a French author to translate his work abroad, to adapt it in series or in smaller digital elements to pass them on Dailymotion, Canal or other, seems to me to be an exciting subject for this famous “soft power”, which remains very important for France, “he said.
The desire to create a group mixing books and audiovisual
The other scenario, deemed more realistic, is for Vivendi to sort out which publishing houses to keep and which to sell. This is the one believed by Conor O’Shea, a financial analyst who follows the group for Kepler Cheuvreux. “The most likely is that he sells the French activities of Hachette, or else the segments where the two groups have a market share well above 50% (school, dictionaries, paperbacks)”, he explains to the AFP.
“He likes media activities for their ability to generate cash quickly and their stable growth,” recalls the analyst. By buying Lagardère, “he wants to create a French Bertelsmann, a stable family group mixing books and audiovisual”. The German Bertelsmann attempted a similar operation in the United States, where it owns Penguin Random House. He wanted to acquire Simon & Schuster, and the government moved to block what he called an “anti-competitive merger”.
Strong political fears
In France, this logic of safeguarding competition is compounded by strong political fears. Vincent Bolloré chaired, in the media he owns, CNews and Europe 1, a marked right turn.
Two former Ministers of Culture are convinced that he is pursuing the same goal in the book. He “defends an ideological project of the far right”, accused the socialist Aurélie Filippetti, also an author, at the end of January. It could “support a unique current of ideas, which is the one we know”, according to Françoise Nyssen, minister in the first government of President Emmanuel Macron, and also patron of Actes Sud editions.