Vivendi shareholders supported the fragmentation of the group to list the company’s different brands separately. And this left winners and losers on opening day. The action of Vivendi registered a 41% rebound this Monday on French soil on its first day without Canal+, the Havas advertising agency and the Louis Hachette publishing house. In fact, it was only Canal+ that collapsed in its first solo session by cutting its price by 21%.
Not all companies started this December 16 in the same market. Vivendi will remain on the Paris stock exchange and within the French Cac index, for the moment, while Louis Hachette will enter the Euronext Growth Paris index. Canal+ prepares its own venture into the London Stock Exchange and Havas does it in Amsterdam.
In this way, Vivendi closes its first solo session with a rise of 33%, placing its share at its highest level for the year (it advances 14.9% in 2024). While Canal+ had set an opening price of £290, according to Bloombergand ended the session at 2.29 pounds per share. Havas rises more than 2.5% in its debut to 1.82 euros while Louis Hachette reaches 1.39 euros per title compared to the 1.2 euros with which it debuted on the market.
The objective of the separation by the company is to highlight the brands of the communication conglomerate that have been penalized on the stock market in recent years. And Canal+ is the one that becomes the largest of the four after the separation and was valued at 3,000 million euros by UBS before its debut in London. JP Morgan even made an estimate that doubled UBS’s valuation.
At the moment, there is no market monitoring or price targets on Canal+, Havas or Louis Hachette, according to the analysis and investment firms that FactSet brings together. Yes, there is consensus in the case of Vivendi that maintains its purchasing advice after the dissolution and with a path ahead of 48% to the target price of 3.67 euros.
Even so, the market does not unanimously value the position as favorable. Deutsche Bank reduced its recommendation from buy to hold for Vivendi after the group’s fragmentation into four independent listed securities. In his opinion, the main catalyst to buy was already exhausted with the announcement of the separation than with it already executed. “Although the sum of the four Vivendi entities quote 7% above its previous market capitalization, this is less than we had anticipated,” they commented in a note from the investment bank.
Likewise, the divisions of the Vivendi Group into four leave the value of the telecommunications and multimedia content group with a debt that amounts to 70% of its total market capitalization, which reaches 7,910.5 million euros.
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