Vivendi’s latest quarterly financial results yesterday provided us with an update on the company’s plans to sell up to half of Universal Music off to partners.
Talks with Tencent to buy up to 20% of UMG continue: Vivendi said that the due diligence and legal documentation should be finished within the next few weeks. That deal valued UMG at around $33bn, with the good news for Vivendi being – according to the company anyway – that other potential investors have emerged showing “interest” in buying a stake at roughly the same valuation.
As for the financials, they showed that UMG’s revenues in the third quarter of 2019 were €1.8bn (around $2bn), up 16% year-on-year. That included a 13.3% rise in UMG’s recorded-music revenues to €1.4bn, with streaming accounting for €837m ($936m) of that – streaming growth for UMG’s recorded-music division of 19.7% year-on-year. Music publishing revenues grew by 8.3% to €293m ($328m).
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