Canal+ Raises MultiChoice Bid

South African billionaire Patrice Motpe is in talks with Vivendi’s Canal Please to join its bid for the broadcaster Multi Choice. Bloomberg understands the French media company is looking to make a formal offer early next month. For more on this story, now let’s bring in Bloomberg Ondiro Oganga, who joins us from Johannesburg. So, Ondira, what’s the significance of Patrick Monceva joining into this bid? Vonnie Patrice is one of the richest black men in South Africa and so bringing him on board helps. Vivendi meet South Africa stringent black ownership requirements. And this stems from an affirmative action dubbed Black Economic Empowerment that requires that foreign companies are owned at least 25% by black people. And this was to promote inclusion of black people in the workforce and also labour force and drop them into economic activities. It’s a good deal for Vivendi because it enables them meet that regulatory requirement, but also it’s a good deal should Patrice take it because when it diversifies his wealth portfolio, but then again it started to be one of the biggest. Bee deals in South Africa. We understand that they’ll be making a formal offer that is said to be drafted in the next couple of days and sent to Multi Choice. Just to jog your memory, they were offering 125 runs per share, valuing the whole company at $2.9 billion. And so the independent board will consider it in the next couple of weeks and we’ll know if they like it or not. What should this offer be accepted? What does it mean for Vivendi? It’s good for diversification and expanding the footprint across Africa. Vivendi through Canal Place has a great footprint in Francophone Africa, but Multi Choice opens them up to 50 countries across Africa. Canal Plus brings on board 8 million subscribers. Multi Choice brings on board 23 million subscribers and combined they’re hoping to grow to about 50 million subscribers. Investing in local content and also investing in sports and Vivendi has made it very clearly that they want to take on the global giants. Like Disney and Netflix. And by doing this, they’ll be giving themselves an upper hand. Multi Choice has Show Max, which is the leading streaming platform in Africa, ahead of Netflix with 2.1 million subscribers, and Netflix comes second with 1.8 million subscribers.