PARIS (Reuters) - Shares in French TV company M6 slumped on Tuesday after Bertelsmann's RTL Group scrapped a plan to sell its controlling stake in M6.
PARIS (Reuters) – Shares in French TV company M6 slumped on Tuesday after Bertelsmann’s RTL Group scrapped a plan to sell its controlling stake in M6.
M6 shares were down 4.1 percent in early session trading.
Dropping the sale of RTL’s 48.3% stake in M6 means Bertelsmann will have to wait five years before considering any new bids for the French TV network, known for its high margins in a sector challenged by the competition of U.S. streaming platforms such as Netflix, Amazon Prime and Disney+.
M6 will apply for a new five-year broadcast authorisation from May 2023. Once granted by France’s audiovisual authority, Arcom, it cannot change its controlling shareholder for that period of time, under French law.
RTL and Bouygues, which is the parent group of France’s biggest private TV network TF1, ended a plan to merge M6 and TF1 into a national television champion last month, saying demands by the French competition authority made it unworkable.
(Reporting by Mathieu Rosemain; Editing by Sudip Kar-Gupta)
Reuters, the news and media division of Thomson Reuters, is the world’s largest international multimedia news provider reaching more than one billion people every day. Reuters provides trusted business, financial, national, and international news to professionals via Thomson Reuters desktops, the world's media organizations, and directly to consumers at Reuters.com and via Reuters TV. Learn more about Thomson Reuters products: