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CTS Eventim To Purchase Vivendi’s See Tickets, Festival Business
CTS Eventim and Vivendi have signed a put option agreement on the sale of Vivendi’s festival and ticketing business for an undisclosed sum.
Vivendi is the parent company of See Tickets, the number two ticketing provider in the UK behind Ticketmaster. The deal with CTS Eventim also includes See Tickets’ operations in the U.S., Belgium, Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, and Switzerland. See Tickets France is excluded from the deal.
See Tickets, by its own admission, sold some 44 million tickets in 2023, for concerts, trade fairs, sporting events, and more.
Vivendi also owns festivals, including Love Supreme, Nocturne, Sundown, Boundary Brighton, The Long Road, and Junction 2 (all UK), Garorock (FR), Ion (Albania), and dance music brand Cogo, which organizes various events across various locations.
Vivendi’s ticketing and festival activities, subsumed under the Vivendi Village umbrella, “collectively produced €137 million [$148 million] in revenues in 2023,” according to today’s press release, which continues to state, that “the ticketing business generated roughly €105 million of that, with the UK market responsible for the largest share, followed by its U.S. market. The festival business that is part of the current deal generated an additional €32 million.”
Vivendi’s performance hall activities, including L’Olympia in Paris, as well as Brive Festival, are not part of the deal.
CTS Eventim denied Pollstar‘s request for comment on the purchase price for these assets.
The deal has been fully negotiated and agreed upon by both Vivendi and CTS Eventim. However, French law requires the consultation of the relevant employee representative bodies to complete the transaction.
See: CTS Eventim Posts Record 2023 Results
Hala Bavière, CEO of Vivendi Village, and member of Vivendi’s executive committee, commented, “I am proud of what has been accomplished over more than a decade and extremely grateful for the strong dedication of all the teams involved. We at Vivendi are convinced that CTS Eventim will be the right company to bring our ticketing and festival activities to new heights, supporting See Tickets to remain a state-of-the-art company in services and technology, while fostering the growth of the festivals and preserving their unique identities and audience.”
CTS Eventim CEO Klaus-Peter Schulenberg said, “With See Tickets and its festival
operations, Vivendi has established two notable players in the ticketing and live
entertainment sector. I’d like to thank Vivendi for the productive negotiations, which have created a strong foundation for success in an industry enjoying robust growth across Europe. The acquisition supports our internationalization strategy and will also benefit artists and their managers, as we will be able to offer even more seamless services on a global scale. We look forward to collaborating with our new colleagues on shaping the future of live entertainment.”