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VIVENDI UNIVERSAL PUBLISHING
The sad, short history of Vivendi Universal Publishing, 2000 to 2002, had rich roots in French journalism going back to the days when Charles-Louis Havas's homing pigeons carried news dispatches from city to city in pouches strapped to their legs. Havas's company reinvented itself for more than a century, dabbling in diverse enterprises. The French conglomerate Vivendi acquired Havas in 1998 and continued with more transformations. The company was redubbed Vivendi Universal Publishing in 2000. With the parent Vivendi's 2001 acquisition of U.S. publishing house Houghton Mifflin, Vivendi Universal Publishing was briefly the world's third largest publisher and second largest educational publisher. The parent company, Vivendi, strapped for cash by aggressive expansion, placed Vivendi Universal Publishing up for sale in 2002.Drawn mostly from material supplied by the company |
| Vivendi Universal Publishing's legacy can be traced to 1835 when Charles-Louis Havas founded Agence Havas. His sons Charles-Guillaume and Auguste took over the news agency in 1874 and continued in their father's footsteps, developing a network of international correspondents to collect information from around the globe through such means as the Chappe telegraph system, a fleet of carrier pigeons and later the telephone. |
| In 1897, Agence Havas was registered as a limited company. It is still to this day the world's leading information service and continues to build partnerships with foreign news services and develop its advertising space sales business through a network of newspapers. In 1918, the information division generated 70 percent of Havas's revenues. |
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In 1920, Agence Havas underwent a radical transformation when it merged with the Sociéte Générale d'Annonces. The company rapidly became a leader in press advertising sales, later expanding into radio and movies. In 1923, with the takeover by the Avenir Publicité advertising agency, Agence Havas entered outdoor advertising. Between the two world wars, the growth of the advertising business compensated for the losses incurred by the information branch. In 1940, the state removed the information branch from Agence Havas to create an official news agency that became Agence France Presse in 1944. The global news, known by its dateline logo AFP, was especially strong in the French colonial empire and French-speaking nations, but its clients also include major newspapers and news organizations elsewhere.
In 1945, Agence Havas was nationalized. Despite difficulties, the company diversified by entering the travel market. From 1958 onwards, travel and advertising boomed. With the prosperity, the agency broadened its business, moving into free press in 1971, professional press in 1975, book publishing in 1979, and pay-television in 1984 with the launch of Canal+.
In 1987, Agence Havas was privatized and changed its name to Havas S.A.
Ten years later, Havas S.A. reorganized its business into the six core areas of audiovisual, communications consulting, information and publishing, local media, travel and leisure, and multimedia. Havas S.A. was among the top communications groups in the world.
The years 1998 and 1999 were important for the group. Havas became a wholly owned subsidiary of Vivendi, a rapidly growing company under visionary Jean-Marie Messier. He had taken a profitable French utility construction and operating company and, with acquisitions, was cobbling together a global media conglomerate. Messier divested local media, travel and leisure, audiovisual, outdoor advertising and advertising sales, and the Canal+ was brought directly into the Vivendi fold. The gradual divestment of Havas Advertising was completed in 2001. Over the same period, Havas acquired a number of new companies: Quotidien Santé in France, Doyma in Spain, Anaya in Spain, OVP Vidal in France, Cendant Software USA, L'Etudiant in France, Barbour Index in Britain, Aique in Argentina, Atica and Scipione Brazil, and several U.S. companies in the health industry.
At the end of June 2000, Vivendi, Canal+ and the Canada-based Seagram conglomerate that owned the giant U.S. movie and music company Universal, announced a strategic business alliance and the creation of Vivendi Universal. Havas was renamed Vivendi Universal Publishing and became the publishing division of the new group. VU Publishing's business activities centered around five business sectors: games, education, literature, health and information.
In 2001, further changes considerably modified the profile of Vivendi Universal Publishing's business. The acquisition of Houghton Mifflin, a venerable Boston-based publisher, made VU Publishing the second-largest educational publisher worldwide. That same year, the press business was also restructured. Following the sale of Courrier International to the newspaper Le Monde in July 2001, Newbiz was also sold to L'Ile des Médias.
On April 18, 2002 Vivendi Universal concluded an agreement to sell VU Publishing's health and B2B information businesses to investment funds Cinven, Carlyle and Apax, effective June 30, 2002.
Vivendi Universal Publishing, now the third largest publisher worldwide, focused on content creation. Organized around five business sectors: games, education, literature, health and information.
The banks and financial institutions that had funded the parent Vivendi's expansion under Messier became jittery in 2002 that the company would default on its massive debt load. Even so, Messier, described as an acquisitions addict, continued buying more companies. These included a mishmash of companies -- a telephone company on Morocco, a wireless company in Monoco, a garbage hauler in Latin America. Despite Messier's rhetoric about Vivendi becoming a global media content and distribution company through technological convergence, few saw a cohesive pattern taking form. Amid revelations about off-sheet obligations and ill-timed Messier insults to the French business community, which many French people took as slaps at French culture, Vivendi's board of directors removed Messier in July 2002 and replaced him with a respected French pharmaceutical executive, Jean-Ren´ Fourtou. Within weeks Fourtou spun off the money-losing Canal+ and then began a series of sales to raise cash beginning with Houghton Mifflin and other Vivendi Universal Publishing assets. |
See also:
Corporate profile: Vivendi
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