Vincent Bolloré celebrates the group’s bicentenary and leaves the helm to his children

“Vincent gets involved in everything, he just has to take my place.” You are the words of a Vincent Bolloré elementary school teacher to her parents who play prophetic looking at the career path of the Breton magnate. From the ‘little prince of cash flow’, as he was called in the 1980s, to the 14th richest man in France, with an estimated assets of around $ 8.4 billion, Bolloré is now preparing, on February 17, to officially pass the witness to his children, exactly 200 years after the birth of the group of the same name founded in Ergué-Gabéric, near Quimper, in Brittany. A long-planned transition from the financier after about 40 years at the helm of the family group. “It will be the seventh generation” at the helm of the group, explained recently the financier who will turn 70 in April and who has four heirs: sons Sébastien, Yannick, Cyrille and Marie. “In the last 2-3 years I have already gone from being a manager to a director. In February, my family will have the opportunity to continue the industrial saga”, underlined Bolloré, who has always been very proud of the long family history: “my family has known three kings, an emperor, twenty-six presidents of the Republic “, he likes to remember. The roots, the family, are an integral part of the strategy he has implemented throughout his career: “to have the long term – he explained years ago – you need to keep a family capital: when you are in control of your future you can do things in time and you will be better off rather than being dominated by the financial markets. ” Born on April 1, 1952 in Boulogne-Billancourt, in the Paris region, Bolloré, a practicing Catholic (“every Sunday I go to mass and when I go out, I’m a new man” he explained to ‘Liberation’ in 1999), he begins his long career professional in 1970 at the Banque de l’Union européenne industrielle et financière, before joining the Compagnie financière Edmond de Rothschild in 1975. But the family paper company founded in 1822 and specializing in the production of bible paper and cigarette papers (the Ocb brand, the acronym of Odet-Cascadec-Bolloré, was created in 1918), which is on the verge of failure, it will force him to change trajectory sooner than necessary. In 1981, in fact, he took over the company that was previously led by his father, Michel, for a symbolic franc and focuses on relaunching the group: he convinces employees to reduce their salaries by 20% in exchange for keeping their jobs and transforms the company by taking it out of the sector to which it belongs and investing in the sector of ultra-fine plastic films. In a few years, also thanks to financial transactions that allow him to obtain rapid capital gains, he revolutionizes the group by diversifying and transforming it into an industrial conglomerate that operates in various sectors: from energy to agri-food to transport and logistics. In 1986, what in France was dubbed ‘the ideal son-in-law of the French business’ in those years, bought Scac from Suez, which allowed him to enter the logistics and maintenance sector in France and to take his first steps in Africa. with Socopao. It strengthened itself on the African continent by acquiring, among other companies, Delmas-Vieljeux in 1991 and Saga in 1997. “When I started dealing with” the family group “it had a turnover of 20 million euros, today it has a turnover of over 20 billion euros (in 2020 it had a turnover of 24.1 billion euros). 800 people worked and now 80 thousand people work there “, explained Bolloré last January 19 during a hearing before the French Senate. The only thing that has not changed “is the main office which is in Ergué-Gabéric, which is not a tax haven in the Netherlands Antilles but a village near Quimper”. As the entrepreneur himself explained to ‘Le Monde’ in 2013, “maintaining a family group requires both a lot of rigor and a lot of audacity: when I took over the company in 1981 there were similar groups that then disappeared. That’s why I sleep with one eye and I look forward to the opportunities “. Bolloré is used to numerous financial blitzes and generally taking home large capital gains (including the 2.5 billion in 1998 achieved by selling its stake in Bouygues acquired the previous year). In Italy, the Breton financier, who was very close to the former banker Antoine Bernheim, ‘landed’ in 1999 by buying the shares held by the French investment bank Lazard in Mediobanca. In 2002, by joining the board of directors of Piazzetta Cuccia, he also ‘acquired’ a privileged position to be able to act as a protagonist in Italian capitalism. The ‘partnership’ with Bernheim, whose father was a friend of Bolloré’s grandmother, was broken in 2010 when the Breton financier took over the vice presidency of Generali (a position he will hold until 2013), supporting Cesare Geronzi as president in replacement of the same banker businessman who had turned 85 by now. Meanwhile, in France in 2004 he began his climb to Havas, the advertising and consultancy group in business communication – which was later sold to Vivendi – and then began to enter the media sector by force, creating the television network the following year. Direct 8 and in 2006 launching the free newspaper Direct Soir. In 2012 the Canal + group, a subsidiary of Vivendi, took over the television channels of the Bolloré group which in exchange obtained a stake in Vivendi. It is the beginning of the takeover in the French media company that Bolloré will begin to lead from 2014. Risana Vivendi by strengthening Canal + (audiovisual), developing Universal (music), acquiring the videogame publisher for smartphones Gameloft in 2016. In 2019 the controlled group , 27% from the financier, takes over Editis, at the same time increasing its presence in publishing. After entering in 2020 with a 29.2% stake in the Lagardère group capital, it is now preparing to launch a takeover bid on Arnaud Lagardère’s company, at the same time taking control of important assets such as the transalpine radio ‘Europe 1’, the weekly ‘Le Journal du Dimanche’, the magazine ‘Paris Match’ and the publishing group Hachette. Bolloré’s dream of conquering two significant and closely related Italian assets in one fell swoop such as the media and telecommunications clashes with the determination of the Berlusconi family to defend his group from the financier’s blitz. In 2021, after 5 years of lawsuits and appeals, Vivendi, which had risen to 28.8% in Mediaset, threw in the towel and will now gradually drop to a limited 4.61%. Vivendi, on the other hand, remains Tim’s largest shareholder with a 23.75% stake. Media, finance but not only. Bolloré has always had an eye for new technologies and in particular has always believed a lot and from the beginning of its path in the lithium metal polymer batteries developed by its Blue Solutions. After the fiasco in the Autolib ‘adventure, the car sharing service started in Paris in 2011 and ended in 2018, relaunches 100% electric buses with Bluebus. For years its ‘goose that lays the golden eggs’ with numerous acquisitions made over the past 40 years, Bolloré is preparing to divest its operations in Africa which include ports, infrastructure and railway lines. This decision comes after in February 2021 the manager negotiated as part of the investigation opened by the French judiciary who suspected the group of having used, between 2009 and 2011, the political consultancy activities of its branch Euro Rscg – now Havas – to obtain the management of the port of Lomé, in Togo, for the benefit of another of its subsidiaries, Bolloré Africa Logistics. This subsidiary, which in 2020 recorded a turnover of 2.1 billion euros, is present in 42 ports and employs 20,800 employees. Now negotiations are underway to sell Bolloré Africa Logistics to the Italian-Swiss shipowner Msc. Personal friend of the former president of the French Republic, Nicolas Sarkozy, from whom he received the prestigious Legion of Honor, Bolloré has always been able to maintain excellent relations with important personalities a bit like his father who was very close to the former president, Georges Pompidou: from Bernard Poignant, the adviser of the then president François Hollande to the current foreign minister, Jean-Yves Le Drian passing from the former right-wing ministers, Gérard Longuet and Alain Madelin, to the heads of state in the countries where the group is present. With the current president, Emmanuel Macron, however, relations, according to some observers, have cracked in recent years. Years in which, among other things, Bolloré ended up at the center of controversy for his acquisitions in the media. Many criticize the financier for the support given with his media, in particular ‘Cnews’, the all news channel of Canal +, to the controversial far-right columnist Eric Zemmour, candidate in the next presidential elections. However, Bolloré is also very close to the other presidential candidate, Valerie Précresse (‘Les Republicains’), whose father was president of Bolloré Telecom. Put ‘under pressure’ in January by French senators, Bolloré defended himself by arguing that the interest of the group “is not political, it is not ideological but purely economic. For 20 years we have only been interested in economic issues. Our segment in the information sector in France is insignificant. We are small “. But that’s not all. In contesting those who accuse him of wanting to create a French-style ‘Fox News’ with ‘Cnews’, the Breton financier rejects the criticisms, explaining that” it is a channel for debate “:” no one has ambition, intending or willing to make the mistake of doing opinion television. It is not in the aim of the Vivendi – Canal group. The group has no such interest. We stand for freedom of expression. “What Bolloré has in mind is to create a European champion of contents, which defends European and French culture, to counterbalance the US ‘soft power’ and the likely future Chinese domination in this field as well. Bolloré , to the senators of the Commission of Inquiry on Mergers in the Media Sector in France, he explains: “I have no ideology. In my DNA, beyond the fact that I have always said I am a Christian Democrat, the only thing that can be found is freedom “, he stressed, recalling that one of his uncles was one of the 177 Frenchmen who participated in the landing. in Normandy on June 6, 1944. Bolloré also keeps in his wallet a message from General Charles de Gaulle to his father, Michel with the words ‘in memory of our common battle’. “From the point of view of democracy, I think I have a DNA that okay, “he added.” I’ve never been involved in politics and never will “, he explained again. Now that the ‘exit from the scene’ approaches, Bolloré has already prepared the succession in detail: Cyrille is the CEO of Bolloré group; Yannick is the chairman of the Supervisory Board of Vivendi, CEO of Havas and vice-president of the family group. The group’s board of directors also includes the other two children Sébastien and Marie. However, it remains difficult to imagine that ‘the lightning rod’ ( as he defines himself) Vincent Bolloré can completely leave the scene.