This is the latest big move from the richest of Marseille shipowners. Rodolphe Saadé, chairman and CEO of CMA CGM, the most profitable company in France, which recently bought the logistics activities of the Bolloré Group for 5 billion euros, will take over the business daily La Tribune. According to the press release published this Friday morning by CMA CGM confirming information from Europe 1, its subsidiary CMA CGM Media, which consolidates its holdings in the media, will buy out the shares of the shareholder and president of the media, Jean-Christophe Tortora.
“The group has submitted a promise to purchase with a view to acquiring 100% of the capital of the HIMA Group, owner of the newspaper La Tribune. The final completion of the transaction remains subject to consultation with the employee representative bodies”, specifies the shipowner in its press release. The 90 employees (including 40 journalists) of the Tribune, who have only just heard the news through the publication of the official press release, explain “falling into their chair”, slips a journalist to Figaro.
“In recent months, those close to Rodolphe Saadé have constantly repeated that the businessman, beyond La Provence, was only interested in small financial participations in the capital of certain media”, slips an expert in the sector. “The acquisition today of the daily La Tribune, influential in the business community across the territory, finally reveals its true ambitions,” he said.
Since his takeover of the Marseille daily La Provence (for the tidy sum of 81 million euros) last September, at the end of long months of stormy offensives against the founder of Free Xavier Niel, Rodolphe Saadé has been involved in all battles media. Not a day goes by without CMA-CGM Médias, managed since March by Laurent Guimier, hunting for new opportunities.
He set foot at 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 and he joined the chain’s supervisory board. When it raised 40 million euros in early April, the online video media Brut announced in the columns of Figaro the entry into the capital of the Marseille shipowner controlled by Rodolphe Saadé.
After thirty-eight years of existence, La Tribune is opening a new chapter in its history. Bruno Bertez, the Expansion group, Georges Ghosn, LVMH, Alain Weill… the business daily has seen many owners pass by over the years. Jean-Christophe Tortora, later accompanied by Franck Julien (Atalian group) and Laurent Alexandre (founder of Doctissimo and several high-tech companies), ended up taking him back ten years ago at the helm of the Commercial Court of Paris.
The paper newspaper had gradually disappeared over the years, in favor of massive investment in digital as well as deployment in the territories and regions. Defining itself today as “the economic media of transformations and territories”, it has some 20,000 subscribers to its site where 70 to 80% of the content is offered by paying (from 100 to 400 euros per year depending on the formula). The objective is to double this portfolio of subscribers by 2025. From now on, the press group is pushing its pawns in French-speaking Africa. A first subsidiary was opened three years ago in Casablanca in Morocco and a new establishment is planned in Abidjan in Côte d’Ivoire before 2025, the year in which La Tribune will celebrate its 40th anniversary. The press group claims a turnover of 13 million euros in 2022, for an Ebitda (gross operating surplus) of 400,000 euros, according to its president Jean-Christophe Tortora.