European media group RTL Group announced on Friday that its German subsidiary would acquire publishing house Gruner + Jahr from Bertelsmann for 230 million euros.
The agreement reached will "
create the first German cross-media champion,
" said RTL CEO Thomas Rabe, who this year launched a series of mergers or sales of its television activities in France and in the Benelux countries.
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Thomas Rabe, who also heads Bertelsmann, has embarked on a strategy of consolidating the audiovisual sector in Europe in order to face competition from the American giants of online video platforms, notably Netflix and Amazon Prime.
Its most important project to date is the merger of M6, the French division of German RTL, with its rival TF1, France's leading private television channel, owned by Bouygues.
Synergies of 100 million euros per year
This transaction was widely seen as the prelude to a merger of the group's German television activities with ProSiebenSat.1 Media, in which the Italian television group Mediaset has a large minority stake.
Thomas Rabe did not rule out the possibility of such a rapprochement on Friday. “
In the next two or three years, I do not exclude that we can get closer to ProSieben,
” he said during a conference with journalists. He said the ongoing merger projects in France and the Netherlands must first get the green light from regulators and that, if granted, this would set an important precedent for a possible merger in Germany.
RTL estimates that the acquisition of Gruner + Jahr will generate synergies of around 100 million euros per year. The group also reported on Friday a turnover up 36% in the second quarter compared to the same period of the previous year. It has also raised its forecasts for 2021: it now forecasts a turnover of 6.5 billion euros, against 6.2 billion previously expected, and an EBITDA of 1.05 billion euros against 975 million previously.
