According to Semana, the Barcelona-based media group Planeta, the leading book publishing company in Spanish, will pay $338 million for 55% of Casa Editorial El Tiempo.
This means almost 13 times the 2006 EBITDA of $28 million.
The Santos family selected Planeta over Prisa, the publisher of El Pais.
They key issue here has been not just money (the $338 million from Planeta, versus the $310 million from Prisa) but the acceptance by Planeta of a nine-person board for the new company, designed to keep the Santos family in control of the editorial voice of El Tiempo.
So… the Santos family got more than the Bancrofts.
Planeta won, but El Tiempo didn’t lose.
Credit Suisse and Luis Fernando Santos made an excellent deal.
The question here is why and how Planeta had so much money to invest in a newspaper when their ones in Spain (Avui, La Razon and Adn) are not very succesful and lose a lot of money.
Semana is wrong when it says that Avui is a leftist paper, and La Razon a centrist one.
Avui is a conservative, nationalistic paper in Barcelona and La Razon a right-wing one in Madrid.
Of course, Prisa was the best choice as a newspaper partner, but they wanted more control.
