Bauer Media completes sale to Mercury Capital
Bauer Media’s Australian publishing division is now officially owned by Mercury Capital, with the relevant regulatory authorities providing approval on the sale.
Bauer Media Australia’s staff, print and digital assets and New Zealand mastheads have all now been transferred to Mercury Capital as part of the deal which is rumoured to be worth less than $50m.
It was announced in June that Bauer would be selling its assets to the private equity business, but the deal has reportedly been on the table for much longer, pre-dating the sale of Pacific Magazines to Bauer Media earlier this year.
It’s expected that Mercury Capital will resurrect some of the New Zealand titles which were closed earlier this year when Bauer Media decided to leave the market early on in the COVID-19 lockdowns. Mercury Capital is led by New Zealander Clark Perkins and has some prominent business figures from the country on its board.
Before the sale, Bauer Media Australia CEO Brendon Hill said the Australian titles which had been paused during the lockdown would be returned to print for their September issues, but the business also still has a number of staff stood down and retrenched around 150 workers during the Pacific Magazines merger.
In 2012, Australian Consolidated Press (ACP) sold its magazine assets to Bauer Media for $525m, four years after James Packer sold the business, and other media assets, to private equity group CVC Capital for $5.6bn.
Bauer Media acquired Pacific Magazines for $40m.
The incompetent MEN who destroyed a once great industry will get away with it scott free – for now – while the mostly female workers are redundant in a COVID wasteland.
Can’t wait to see Channel 7 go down in flames after what happened to Pacific. Big Brother isn’t going to keep that lame duck flying.
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Rumoured to be less than $10M
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Bauer are some of the worst players in this game, and they didn’t exactly get away scott free. Bauer paid $535 million for ACP, then $40 million for Pacmags, and sold the whole lot for $50 million a few years later. And why make this about gender? The CEO of Bauer is Yvonne Bauer, who is less of a man than you make out (although maybe just as incompetent). Lots of people to blame in this situation, but let’s not get sexist.
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$34M is the number you’re looking for but includes concessions and staggered payments over 3 years. Your under $10M rumour is the first of these payments. Still, a massive loss, and when you consider that Bauer Germany had to kick in $40M AUD to purchase Pacific as this was it’s only opportunity to offload the business and escape even worse losses shows the gaping hole it was truly in.
There are analysts who have reported that Bauer globally is now worth less than €60M, down from a high of €3.5B.
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That will happen Miss Thang, but not because of the gender based outrage that you are promoting. Nobody reads mags anymore! If you were made redundant by Bauer, it’s probably a blessing in disguise.
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Where Chump Change do you get these figures from, please?
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Didn’t realise MEN was synonymous with technology. Magazines died because it got replaced by Instagram/Facebook and other digital tabloids.
Also what’s going on with the moderation process? Didn’t realise you could demonize half the population for a FEMALE skew medium no longer being purchased by FEMALES.
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