Organizational Change in the Global Media Markets

Inhaltsangabe:Abstract: The global media industry has been subject to radical changes in its structure in recent years. International media companies have reached a dominant position in the global media markets through an enormous wave of mergers. Since the year 2000 the three biggest ever media mergers have taken place. AOL merged with Time Warner, Vivendi agreed on a merger with the Seagram Company and Canal+ and Viacom acquired the CBS Corporation. In 2001 the six biggest media conglomerates - AOL Time Warner, Walt Disney, Vivendi Universal, Viacom, Bertelsmann and News Corporation - alone generated revenues of $160 billion in comparison to aggregate revenues of $415 billion obtained by the Top 50 media companies. This development was triggered by radical changes in the US - Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) regulation policy. Though it is the change in the FCC’s deregulation policy which made the wave of mergers possible to start off with, the reasons why companies actually merged were more complex. The headwords dominating most corporate growth strategies at that time were ‘convergence’, ‘synergy’ and ‘need for large scale’. Looking at the assessments of media mergers and corporate strategies published by the press and investment analysts one notices that they underlie a certain tendency towards unanimous and trend affected formation of opinion. While in 1999 the idea of convergence was embraced and denominated as one of the biggest opportunities for media companies ever, in 2002 the ratings and assessments of companies which tried to obtain first mover advantage in the newly emerging converged market were principally critical. At large, these judgments correlated to a very high degree with the rise and downturn of the new economy. Accordingly, some of the executives, who pressed ahead with the idea of convergence and spurred on mergers in order to achieve synergies, like Mr. Middelhoff (former CEO of Bertelsmann), Mr. Messier (former CEO of ‘Vivendi Universal) and recently Mr. Case (former chairman of AOL Time Warner) had to vacate their positions. Yet some business leaders are beginning to break up the fully integrated media groups that emanated from these mergers. This change in corporate strategies and in the assessment of media mergers brings up the following question: Is it that a fundamental change in the business environment has occurred? And did this change make the economic motives which not long ago underlay the wave of [...]