Vivendi closes publishing connection
Another nail in Vivendi's cross-media dreams of empire was hammered home today when the French company sold Houghton Mifflin for $1.6 billion ($1.28 billion in cash and $380 million in assumed debt). Vivendi had paid $2.2 billion.
Now, think about this for a moment. Two of the biggest movies in history, the Harry Potter series and the The Lord of the Rings trilogy, are basically massive publishing tie-in marketing machines.
Based on my dealings with various U.S. holdings, it is clear to me that they thought just buying operating units was enough -- there was never any cross-media title development, nor even ways to think about selling music more efficiently. More's the pity, since, at one point, they had all the pieces to build something quite new and profitable, if only they'd followed through. Instead, Vivendi acted like a bank, a lazy bank at that, building assets without actively managing them.
Posted by Mitch Ratcliffe at December 31, 2002 11:40 AM | TrackBack