The board of directors of the regional daily La Provence approved on Wednesday the appointment of Laurent Guimier, director of CMA CGM Média, as its chairman. He succeeds Jean-Emmanuel Sauvée, advisor to Rodolphe Saadé, the boss of CMA CGM, who was in charge of the transformation of the La Provence group since its acquisition by the billionaire in October 2022. Jean-Emmanuel Sauvée will soon take over the management of a new maritime division of CMA CGM, said the Marseille group.
Laurent Guimier will thus strengthen the governance of La Provence-Corse Matin, in conjunction with its CEO Gabriel d'Harcourt, a former member of La Voix du Nord who arrived in December 2022. It will have to accelerate, says the CMA CGM press release, the implementation of the transformation plan (called "Mistral winner") of the regional daily, distributed to 68,806 copies in 2022 (down 6.2%), according to the CMPA.
Dismissed on October 3, 2022 from the news department of France Télévisions, Laurent Guimier joined the teams of Rodolphe Saadé, CEO of the CMA CGM group, last March. At the age of 51, he took over the management of the new subsidiary CMA CGM Media created by the billionaire and which brings together his interests in the media. Rodolphe Saadé, "very attentive at the moment to the media sector", according to one of his relatives, has already invested in the written press and television.
He set foot in M6 last December by crossing the threshold of 5% of the capital of the subsidiary of the German Bertelsmann. Since then, the Marseille shipowner has risen to more than 8% by buying shares on the market. "We believe in M6's strategy and we want to support it. We do not intend to take control of it," he said at the time. The roads of M6 and CMA CGM had already crossed when the free channel went on sale. After the abortive merger with TF1 last September, M6 had received three takeover offers, including one from the Banijay-CMA CGM-Fimalac trio.
Investment in online media Brut
The boss of CMA CGM is also 100% owner of the regional daily La Provence in Marseille since last September, after months of stormy negotiations marked by the withdrawal of his competitor Xavier Niel, founder of Iliad. At the end of the year, he recruited Gabriel d'Harcourt, until then Deputy Managing Director of La Voix du Nord, to the general management of the regional daily and its subsidiary Corse Matin. Finally, when it raised between 35 and 40 million euros in early April, the online video media Brut announced the entry into the capital of the Marseille shipowner controlled by Rodolphe Saadé.
Rather discreet since his departure from France Télévisions, Laurent Guimier has held most of the functions in journalism up to management positions. Passed by Le Figaro, Europe 1 and the radio France Info, he arrived in the summer of 2020 at France Télévisions. He had first directed the continuous news channel franceinfo, before being propelled three months later, in September, boss of the news in place of Yannick Letranchant. Before his departure from the public audiovisual group, he had been blamed in part for the poor audience scores of his political program "Élysée 2022" on France 2 and more generally of the presidential sequence on the group's antennas.
