Casa Editorial El Tiempo is the best media company in Colombia.
The Santos family owns El Tiempo, the cornerstone newspaper of a holding with a financial newspaper, a popular tabloid, a city TV station and several Web sites.
The president, Luis Fernando Santos, announced today that his family is hiring an investment bank in order to select a “strategic partner.”
This is big news for the Latin American market where 99% of the newspapers are family-owned.
Many of these companies are in the hands of their third, fourth or fifth generations of the founding family, and more and more, the management becomes difficult.
INNOVATION, which has helped many of these families in these generational transitions, has the feeling that what we have here is not just a family looking for an easy exit of internal conflicts, which always exist, but also trying to find the new capital needed to face new investments. And do it all without losing the “identity” and traditions of the companies.
PRISA International, a branch of El País in Spain, always wanted to buy some of the best Latin American newspapers, but with this kind of independent and professional advice, the list of candidates could include not only Spanish speaking companies but also other American and European ones.
Perhaps the Italian RCS Media, which has just become the largest press group in Spain, or Edipresse, the Swiss family company that has invested in newspapers and magazines in Spain and Portugal…
El Tiempo is the first, but many other Latin American companies will follow a very similar process.
Very soon.
Thanks to Claude Erbsen.