The luxury giant LVMH, led by billionaire Bernard Arnault, has injected 65 million euros into the
Le Parisien
press group , which it controls, in order to absorb its losses, according to a legal announcement consulted on Wednesday by AFP , confirming
information from The letter A
.
According to the legal announcement published on August 18, the sole partner of Le
Parisien-Aujourd'hui in France
, i.e. Ufipar, a holding company controlled by LVMH, "
has decided to increase the share capital
" of the press group by nearly 65 million euros to then “
reduce it, due to losses
”, by the same amount.
The luxury giant had already bailed out its media group Les Echos-Le Parisien at the end of 2018 to the tune of 83 million euros.
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While
Les Echos
broke even in 2021 for the first time since 2008,
Le Parisien
is still striving to catch up on the backlog in terms of digital conversion.
“
For a long time, (Le Parisien) was not able to compensate for the decline in paper with digital
”, remaining “
very exposed to the continuous erosion of newsstand sales
”, declared in January Pierre Louette, CEO of the group Les Echos-Le Parisien, in the columns of its economic daily.
But in 2021,
Le Parisien
"
reached an inflection point
" with twelve consecutive months of upward distribution, he said, hoping to see it "
closer to equilibrium
" and conquer 200,000 digital subscribers by 2025, a objective established as part of a new editorial project, rolled out in 2020. This was accompanied by the abolition of departmental publications and a voluntary departure plan which concerned a total of fifty employees.
To reduce its exposure to the paper press crisis, the Les Echos-Le Parisien group also sold the portage distribution companies Proximy and Média Presse in October 2021 to the printing heavyweight Riccobono.
So many transformations that weighed on the accounts of the Parisian and which can explain the recapitalization decided by LVMH, according to experts in the sector.