Word: bertelsmann
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...hard to knock Middelhoff for his record at Bertelsmann. He convinced the company to buy a stake in the Internet service provider American Online when it was still a fledgling company. Later, he arranged to sell the stake back to AOL for a $7 billion profit. The deal helped land Middelhoff the CEO job in 1998. He profitably sold off a stake in the German pay-TV service Premiere World long before the company, owned by media tycoon Leo Kirch, went bust. Middelhoff also persuaded Bertlesmann to buy the giant U.S. publisher Random House for $1.2 billion. His contract, reportedly...
Some of Middelhoff's recent deals have been less successful. Bertelsmann invested heavily in e-commerce, including a stake in the booksellers Barnes & Noble.com in the U.S. and bol.com in Europe. He also put $30 million into Napster, which he hoped to turn from an illegal song-sharing website to a legitimate portal for selling music. The site is currently being retooled for its new mission. Last year, Bertelsmann admitted having ?890 million in Internet startup losses. Another questionable buy was the $550 million or so Middlehoff paid for the U.S. magazines Fast Company and Inc. just as the Internet...
...Middelhoff's most controversial deals was last year's purchase of a controlling stake in the big European broadcaster rtl. Bertelsmann, which already owned 37% of rtl, got another 30% from Groupe Bruxelles Lambert in exchange for 25.1% of Bertelsmann's shares. Some analysts found the price too high. But what really made the deal hot was Bertelsmann's agreement to allow Groupe Bruxelles to sell the shares on the stock market as soon as 2005. Until then all of the company's shares were closely held by the Mohn family and had never been traded. Middelhoff had made...
...former secretary at the firm who met Reinhard during a game of musical chairs. According to German newspapers, it was Liz Mohn who confronted Middelhoff last week and told him he had to go. It was also she who was appointed last week to head the Bertelsmann Verwaltungsgesellschaft, the holding company that controls the corporation through the shares owned by the family as well as the secretive Bertelsmann Foundation...
...addition to the dispute about taking the company public, there were clear personality differences between the hard-charging Middelhoff and the more restrained culture at Bertelsmann. Middelhoff tried to force the company to centralize. But Bertelsmann executives "didn't want to give up their independence," said Dan Arendt, head of the technology, media and telecom practice at Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu. "There's a strong culture of entrepreneurship...