The world’s leading luxury goods company LVMH, led by businessman Bernard Arnault, has injected 65 million euros into the Le Parisien press group, which it controls, to offset its losses, according to a legal announcement seen yesterday by AFP.
According to the legal announcement published on 18 August, the sole shareholder of Le Parisien-Aujourd’hui en France, Ufipar, a holding company controlled by LVMH, “has decided to increase the group’s share capital” by nearly €65 million and then “reduce it, due to losses”, by the same amount.
It should be remembered that LVMH had already injected €83 million into its media group Les Echos-Le Parisien at the end of 2018. While Les Echos had reached breakeven in 2021 for the first time since 2008, Le Parisien is still trying to catch up on its digital conversion.
Indeed, “For a long time, Le Parisien has not been able to compensate for the decline in paper sales through digital”, remaining “very exposed to the continuous erosion of newsstand sales”, declared Pierre Louette, CEO of the Les Echos-Le Parisien group, in January in the columns of his business daily.
But during 2021, Le Parisien has “reached an inflection point” with twelve consecutive months of rising circulation, he said, hoping to see it “get closer to break-even” and acquire 200,000 digital subscribers by 2025, an objective set as part of a new editorial project, rolled out in 2020. This project also resulted from the abolition of the departmental editions and a voluntary redundancy plan involving a total of fifty employees.
In view of the crisis in the paper press, the Les Echos-Le Parisien group has also sold the distribution companies Proximy and Média Presse in October 2021 to the printing heavyweight Riccobono.
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Featured photos : © Pierre Papier
