The French communication group Vivendi, shareholder of Rush and Mediaset Italy, announced this Tuesday that it has reached an agreement to cede to Pershing Square Holdings a 2.9% stake in its subsidiary Universal Music Group (UMG), which increases its participation in the company to 10%.
In a statement, Vivendi He specified that the ‘hedge fund’ controlled by Bill Ackmann has agreed to pay 1,149 million dollars (almost 1,000 million euros) for that 2.9% so that he values the company at about 35,000 million euros (41,400 million dollars).
Vivendi had started discussions with Pershing on June 4 to transfer 10% of Universal Music to it before proceeding to distribute 60% of the shares of this subsidiary to its shareholders and take it public, which is scheduled for 21 of September.
August 10, The parties had already communicated a commitment for the fund to keep a first stake of 7.1%. Vivendi has also sold another 20% package in recent months to a consortium led by Chinese technology Tencent.
Since 2014, Vivendi has built a world-class media, content and communications group that includes financial holdings such as Rush (newspapers, radio) or Mediaset (TV). Among his businesses is music (Universal Music Group), television and movies (Canal + Group), communications (Havas Group), editorials (Editis), magazines (Medium Prism), video game (Gameloft), live entertainment and ticket sales (Vivendi Village) or streaming Dailymotion.
– .
