LMVH eyes Les Echos

Posted by Mica Swyers on June 22, 2007 at 12:23 PM

Pearson Plc owner of Les Echos is in talks with luxury-goods maker LMVH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton SA to sell the French financial daily. By acquiring Les Echos, LMVH would develop the paper, its website, and Enjeux magazine, but the potential sale is raising concern among journalists about editorial independence and job cuts.

LMVH already owns La Tribune, another French financial paper, but according to Alessandra Coppola, an analyst at London company Standard & Poor’s, thinks that the potential one-off purchase “does not signal the company’s wider interest in media,” but rather, an attempt to “increase the profitability of its small media unit.”

As Rupert Murdoch’s bid for Dow Jones & Co. demonstrates, the race for financial publications as a source of revenue for media companies has led to concern over editorial independence and fears of media moguls directing a paper’s content towards their own business interest. Although LMVH released a statement proclaiming its dedication to editorial independence, employees at Les Echos protested the potential sale by blocking publication this week.

LMVH announced its talks on the same day that Pearson, whose stock fell 0.9% on June 20, announced that it had dropped out of a dual bid with General Electric Co. for Dow Jones in competition with Murdoch’s offer of $60 per share.

Source: Bloomberg