Vivendi in bid for UK agency See Tickets
FRENCH media conglomerate Vivendi is purchasing See Tickets for around £80m, City A.M. understands.
The move follows similar action taken last year, when Vivendi acquired a 65 per cent stake in French online ticket vendors Digitick for €29m (£25.4m).
Vivendi has enjoyed success with Digitick and expects online ticket sales in particular to remain lucrative on both sides of the Channel.
The company declined to comment on the takeover yesterday.
Once part of Lord Lloyd Webber’s Really Useful Group, See Tickets sells around a twenty per cent share of the UK ticket market.
The UK’s second-largest ticketing vendor, See is an official ticketing vendor for events such as the Reading music festival, the BBC Proms in the Park and Top Gear Live. Dutch private equity group Parcom Capita is selling See Tickets, having sold See’s German arm to Dutch rivals CTS Eventim last year.
The company behind Justine Bieber and the Black Eyed Peas, Vivendi owns subsidiaries such as Universal Studios, Activision Blizzard, the computer games publishers, and Universal Music Group, publishers of more than one in four of all records sold across the globe.
Other operations include television broadcasting, telecommunications and pay TV service provision and film production. Founded in 1858 as Compagnie Générale des Eaux, the French firm adopted its current name in 1998 and sold off its water operations, once a core part of its business. Last week the firm said that revenue from video games was offsetting the weak French telecomms market.