The calendar that allows the sale of M6 by its shareholder Bertelsmann is “very tense”, the president of the French Competition Authority, Benoît Coeuré, warned on Tuesday during a hearing in the Senate, while at least three public offers are being studied. acquisition.
The Bertelsmann group is looking for a new buyer for its stake in the radio and television group after the failure of the imagined merger with TF1 (Bouygues group), and finally abandoned by the parties due to the reluctance of the institution he was in charge of reviewing the transaction. From now on, time is running out because the authorization to broadcast the main channel M6 on DTT must be renewed in May 2023 by Arcom, the audiovisual regulator, then preventing by law any change in frequency control for five years.
A European Commission review
According to him, “given the size of the potential buyers as mentioned in the press, logic would dictate that this transaction should be examined by the European Commission”, the guardian of competition in the EU. The latter can decide to send the file to the French authority, but this mechanism “is itself a generator of additional delays,” he noted.
At least three proposals for the acquisition of the M6 group have been submitted and are currently being examined by Bertelsmann. These come from a duo formed by Xavier Niel (Iliad group) and MediaForEurope (ex-Mediaset, the television group founded by Silvio Berlusconi), by the Czech billionaire Daniel Kretinsky, already present in various French media, and by FL Entertainment (Banijay , Betclic) controlled by the French Stéphane Courbit, specially associated for the occasion with Rodolphe Saadé, the head of the shipping giant CMA-CGM.
If all these players don’t have channels, there are “possible conglomerate effects in sectors” other than television, Benoît Coeuré noted.
TF1 and M6 “will be reinvented”
Questioned by the senators who make up the Culture Committee about the consequences of the failure of the TF1-M6 merger for the French audiovisual sector in the face of the streaming giants, the economist explained that the institution he chairs is not based on “the worst of the cases” (an eviction of the channels of the advertising market in favor of the platforms) but in the most “probable”. “I don’t think the operation itself was a fundamental game changer,” he explained.
It is true that the merger would have allowed the channels “to free up resources, but on the one hand some of these resources would have been earned at the expense of their distributors and their advertisers, and on the other hand these resources are not of the same order size as the available for Netflix, Disney or Amazon in the same markets”, he explained.
Source: BFM TV
