Merger approved by Competition Commission, but Tamedia recently accused of “abuse”
Recycling newspapers: it's taking longer to fill up the bin
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - Tamedia and Edipresse, two of Switzerland’s largest print and online media companies, will celebrate their marriage sooner than expected. The complete merger was expected in 2013, but the companies now say they will merge this year, when Tamedia’s purchase of 50.1 percent of the shares is completed.
Tamedia will spend a total of between CHF269.8 and 330.2 million, plus 250,000 registered Tamedia shares, to buy out Edipresse, it says in a press release issued 7 April.
The news comes as the shakeout of Swiss media continues, with several developments in recent days:
- newspapers in French-speaking Switzerland again had a serious bleed of readers in 2010, including the number one, free paper 20 Minutes, Mach (industry agency that tallies official circulation figures) reported 22 March 2011, with German-speaking areas doing better, but nevertheless seeing falling sales
- Tamedia was accused 1 April of abusing its position of power following its takeover of Edipresse, for sharply increasing advertising rates
- five regional newspapers joined forces this week, with a shared platform starting 5 April for international, national and business/economic news.
French language papers in “free fall”
Remp publishes an annual Mach reports in March of every year on how Swiss media fared the previous year, with sales and circulation details which serve as the bible of the advertising industry.
Circulation figures have been falling for a number of years but the process appears to have speeded up in 2010, with public television TSR reported that French-speaking newspapers in particular were in “free fall” last year, in terms of losing readers.
Ads run in English in “serious” Swiss newspapers
Mystery shopper scam: won't give you an honest franc in the end
Lausanne, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - Police in canton Vaud are warning the public of a scam that starts with advertisements run in English in Swiss newspapers the police qualify as “serious”, giving the ads some credibility.
The ads have appeared in recent days in Le Temps, NZZ and La Côte, asking if you want to become a “mystery shopper” and earn CHF320-450 a week.
“The people most often caught” by the scam, says police spokesperson Jean-Christophe Sauterel, “are those who are short of money, unemployed people, for example” who might be trying to earn something on the side, often without declaring it.
The police are focusing on prevention for this reason, since victims are often too embarrassed or afraid to risk their unemployment money if that office finds out.
People caught by the scam can quickly find themselves out of several thousand francs without suspecting this might happen.
How the scam works
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - Le Temps, the main serious newspaper in French-speaking Switzerland, is making several changes to cope with a sharp drop in advertising revenue, cutting 7.5 percent of its editorial staff (10 jobs). It says the subscription price will be raised for 2010. The newspaper says that the advertising revenue decline, which has hit the entire industry, is the worst in 60 years and requires dramatic action. GenevaLunch spoke with another newspaper editor from the region Monday, who said more cuts can be expected at other newspapers in the region in the next two months. Le Temps notes that it was able to keep the job cuts at this level because of offers by several staff to reduce the number of hours they work.
Le Temps editor Jean Jacques Roth explains in a lengthy editorial that subscriptions and newsstand sales rarely cover more than one-third of a newspaper’s revenues but in the past few years costs have risen due to competition from free newspapers’, readers’ rising expectations for coverage, development of web sites, and in the case of Le Temps, good growth in readership.
...and then there was one
Bern, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – The Swiss Competition Commission has given its blessing to the proposed sale of Edipresse’s Swiss operations to Zurich-based Tamedia on the grounds that competition is not threatened by the takeover. Edipresse, Switzerland’s third-largest media company, is based in Lausanne and its operations in Switzerland are limited to the French-speaking area. Tamedia owns media mostly in the German-speaking part of the country.
The competition authorites say that there is no significant overlap in the market coverage.
Zurich, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Profits at Switzerland’s largest media group, Tamedia AG plunged to only CHF800,000, a drop of almost 99 percent in the first half of 2009, the company announced 3 September. The results were even worse than analysts had predicted, and were blamed by the company on the “severe recession and also a collapse in advertising spending“. Sales revenues dropped 15.9 percent in the period versus only a 1.7 percent decline in corresponding costs, despite making savings of CHF47.8 million in the first half of the year.
Geneva, Switzerland (Le Temps, Fre) – The headline seems misleading at first, Première suisse: les archives d’un journal en libre accès sur le Net, which might lead you to think one of the newspapers in Switzerland has changed its attitude to the Internet and is offering yesterday’s news, all of it, for free.
