The largest operation was the acquisition of the Dutch group VNU by the investment consortium Valcon Investments, valued at 7.5 billion euro. Among the companies under the VNU umbrella acquired in the deal was the international research group AC Nielsen. The second-largest acquisition, valued at 4.5 billion euro and still in the process of completion, was the buyback of 25.1 percent by the German group Bertelsmann from the company Groupe Bruxelles Lambert.

The third-largest operation also took place in Germany: the investment companies KKR and Permira together acquired 50.5 percent of the Prosieben television company. Ironically, the German Fair Trade Authorities had previously stopped the purchase of Prosieben by the German publishing giant Axel Springer.

Next in line was the purchase of Bertelsmann’s BMG Music Publishing Group by French media conglomerate Vivendi for 1.63 billion euro. The fifth-largest deal occurred in the United Kingdom, where Murdoch’s BSkyB, -a News Corporation subsidiary-, bought 17.9 percent of ITV, Britain’s largest commercial television network. The protagonist of the sixth-largest operation was Spain’s Prisa group, which successfully launched an offer to acquire an additional 20 percent of Sogecable, where it already held a 22 percent interest, in an operation valued at 988 million euro.

The seventh-largest operation gave rise to a new player in European media: The British concern Mecom, led by David Montgomery, former chairman of the Mirror Group. Montgomery jumped at an opportunity when Norway’s Orkla decided to sell all of its media investments, paying 924 million euro for the Orkla’s assets in Scandinavia and other Eastern European companies.

The eighth operation in the list helped French industrial conglomerate Lagardere to consolidate its media interests with he purchase of the sports and broadcasting rights of Sportfive for 865 million euro. The sellers included Advent, Goldman Sachs and German television RTL, whose largest shareholder is Bertelsmann.

In the ninth-largest operation, the Norwegian group Schibsted acquired the West European assets of Trader Classified Media, which over the course of 2006 liquidated all operations as part of a revision strategy ordered by shareholders. Schibsted’s acquisition topped 553 million euro, and included 87 percent of the Spanish group Anuntis Segundamano, with a significant Latin American presence.

Finally, the tenth-largest media operation in 2006 was the sale of Britain’s Emap’s French subsidiary to Italy’s Mondadori for 550 million euros. InterMedios analyzed 122 sales and acquisitions of European media concerns to complete this study. Of the 122, 65 operations revealed financial data, which reached 29.045 billion euros. This means that the 10 largest operations cited in this study represented 75 percent of the volume of the 65 operations that included the financial figures.

InterMedios Europe, January 10, 2007