Word: seagram
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Veolia's history is no less complicated. After 1994 chairman Jean-Marie Messier moved Compagnie Générale des Eaux full steam into the media business, but his empire cracked after a high-gloss purchase of Seagram to form Vivendi Universal. After Messier's ignominious fall in 2002 in a morass of debt, the environmental-services businesses spun off and dropped the tainted name Vivendi to become Veolia...
...When Seagram bought Polygram in 1998 for $10.6 billion, the French-born ceo Alain Levy found himself out of a job. Not for bad performance: Levy had turned PolyGram into the world's largest music company by a combination of organic growth and strategic acquisitions at a time when CD sales were booming. After the company was sold, Levy, then aged 51, spent several years consulting and pondering the state of a changing industry, and quickly concluded that old models for growth were gone. CD sales peaked in 2000, damaging companies bedeviled by piracy and the online trading of free...
That's quite a leap in the booze business, but Pernod Ricard is no stranger to the power of consolidation. It turned sales around for Chivas Regal and Martell, up 9% and 7%, respectively, since acquiring Seagram in 2001. The degree of difficulty is greater now though, since Allied Domecq's brands and distribution channels are comparatively stronger than Seagram's were. "I don't think they'll get anywhere near the level of growth they got with the Seagram business," says Deutsche Bank analyst Graeme Eadie, citing dragging sales of Kahlua liqueur, Ballantine's scotch and Beefeater...
...DIED. PHILIP JOHNSON, 98, one of America's most innovative architects; in New Canaan, Connecticut. In the 1930s, Johnson helped introduce America to the European glass-and-steel Modernism that would come to dominate its skylines, and developed seminal works of the style such as the Seagram Building and his Glass House. "All that a nervous sensibility, lively intelligence and a stored mind can do, he does," said architectural historian Vincent Scully...
...weeks. "So far, so good," says Mercier. "They've done as well as we expected." Previously, the closest Europe got to a Continentwide network was London-based PolyGram, a film studio that built distribution operations in all the major European territories. But in 1998, PolyGram was bought up by Seagram and absorbed into Universal Pictures. Universal kept its focus on the U.S., leaving Europe's distribution system shattered and scattered. A viable distribution network is a start, but many Culture Ministers recognize that more needs to be done. Three of the biggest players in the cinema stakes - France, Italy...