Vivendi, the French media giant announced that it has entered into preliminary negotiations with Tencent for a strategic investment totaling 10% of the share capital of Universal Music Group (UMG) for about $3.36 billion.
Since 2014, Vivendi has been focused on building a world-class content, media and communications group with European roots. In content creation, Vivendi owns powerful, complementary assets in music (Universal Music Group), movies and series (Canal+ Group), publishing (Editis) and mobile games (Gameloft) which are the most popular forms of entertainment content in the world today. In the distribution market, Vivendi has acquired the Dailymotion platform and repositioned it to create a new digital showcase for its content.
Vivendi and Tencent are also concurrently considering areas of strategic commercial cooperation. In this context, Vivendi is keen to explore enhanced cooperation which could help UMG capture growth opportunities offered by the digitalization and the opening of new markets. Together with Tencent, Vivendi hopes to improve the promotion of UMG’s artists, with whom UMG has created the greatest catalogue of recordings and songs ever, as well as identify and promote new talents in new markets. Vivendi hopes that this new strategic partnership could create value for both Tencent and UMG.