VNU Business Media Europe has a new owner
Today, VNU announced that Business Media Europe has been sold to a British company called 3i. Since my employer, Tweakers.net, is part of VNU Business Publications Benelux, which on its turn is part of VNU Business Media, this means that Tweakers.net is also sold. Interesting.
According to their website, 3i is a private equity firm, the kind of companies recently in the news in the Netherlands because they tend to buy companies, strip them and sell them again. Currently, companies like PCM, the former Vendex-KBB and VNU are bought by private equity firms and the Dutch grocery company Ahold is about to get sold to such a company. The problem in the Netherlands with this kind of firms is that it is tradition that the management of the company takes the strategic decisions and not the shareholders, which is the case in for example the US (and I think in the UK). Another problem is that ‘typical’ Dutch companies are now owned by foreign companies, a potential danger for jobs in the Netherlands, because the private equity firms are not concerned about heritage, just about money, and often this means that jobs get outsourced to countries with a cheap workforce.
When Tweakers.net was sold to VNU, it was already in the news that VNU probably would get sold to a group of investors, among them the Carlyle group. I am curious about the feature of VNU Business Media and Tweakers.net; probably there will not change very much at Tweakers.net.
This entry was posted on Monday, December 18th, 2006 at 13:17 and is filed under English, Internet, Opinion, Personal Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
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