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Mediawan, the KKR-backed French television and film production group behind Call my Agent, has agreed to acquire a German rival owned by the same buyout group, in a sign of how sector consolidation is accelerating to feed the appetite of streaming video platforms.
The all-share deal, which values Germany’s Leonine at about €500mn, also signifies a deepening of the co-operation between KKR and Mediawan, whose founders include French telecoms billionaire Xavier Niel and TV producer Pierre-Antoine Capton.
The private equity group invested in Mediawan’s deal to de-list its shares from the Paris market in 2020. At that time, KKR became a big shareholder in Mediawan while the French group took a 25 per cent stake in Leonine.
Capton, Mediawan’s CEO, said it was the right time for the companies to merge because European regulations were phasing in to require streaming platforms such as Netflix, Amazon’s Prime Video and Disney+ to spend more on locally produced shows.
“After France, Germany will next year become the second country to apply the EU directive to boost local content so it makes strategic sense to do this and work with Leonine to develop more premium content for streaming platforms,” he told the Financial Times.
Philipp Freise, KKR’s co-head of European private equity, said the fund would continue to back Mediawan and expected it to do further acquisitions. “Together we have created the largest independent content production company in continental Europe. A next phase now begins with more deals to come to consolidate the space.”
Streaming platforms have lately been slowing their pace of spending on content globally as they shift focus to profitability over subscriber growth. The dynamic has put pressure on smaller producers, with some choosing to sell up and join larger groups such as Mediawan, to be in a better position to win commissions.
Capton said that Mediawan had experienced little impact from the streaming platforms cutting back, and pointed to Netflix’s recent disclosure that it now had more subscribers in Europe than in the US. “Streaming platforms are not necessarily spending less but they do want to spend better, meaning on fewer, higher quality shows,” he said.
Mediawan was founded in 2015 by Capton, Niel and investment banker Matthieu Pigasse, as a special-purpose acquisition vehicle listed in Paris. The group, which also produced the series One Day, which was streamed on Netflix, has expanded steadily by snapping up small or mid-sized production houses in France and then across Europe.
It entered the US in late 2022 by buying Brad Pitt’s Plan B Entertainment, an acclaimed Hollywood producer known for movies including Moonlight and Money Ball and more recently the hit Netflix science fiction show Three-Body Problem.
Leonine was founded in 2019 with KKR’s backing and has since been buying up production houses in Germany. It backed films such as The Lives of Others and Netflix’s Dark and owns the German-language rights for blockbuster franchises including John Wick.
Once combined with Leonine, Mediawan will have about €1.3bn in annual revenues, compared with under €400mn when it went private in 2020.
It has benefited from an EU directive adopted in 2018, gradually applied in member states, that requires a minimum 30 per cent of European works in the catalogues of streaming services. France went further in an effort to boost their cultural industries, and has required big global streamers to invest at least 20 per cent of their French turnover in European productions.
“We want to keep expanding in Europe, such as in the Nordics, and elsewhere where we are not as present, such as Africa where there is a lot of talent and opportunity,” said Capton.
