Illustrative image. (source: SME - Jozef Jakubčo)
A diverse mix of foreign investors were operating on the Slovak media market 20 years ago.
The daily Hospodárske Noviny was owned by the publisher of the German daily Handelsblatt, the daily Pravda owned by the British Daily Mail group, the daily Sme co-owned by the German publisher Verlagsgruppe Passau, and private television network Markíza had American investors.
In the meantime, the vast majority of foreign owners have left the Slovak media, replaced by Slovak and Czech financiers.
Czechs in Markíza and in TA3
For many years, the television market was one of the most stable in terms of ownership. Markíza was owned by the American group Central European Media Enterprises (CME), the private TV JOJ owned by people surrounding the financial group J&T, and private news television network TA3 was owned by businessman Ivan Kmotrík.
At the end of 2019, the owners of Markíza announced that they had found a new owner for their television group in the form of the PPF Group, under by the richest Czech person, Petr Kellner. He paid an estimated $2.1 billion (€1.9 billion) for CME, which operates 30 TV channels in Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia.
Petr Kellner (source: PPF)
"We want to take advantage of the synergies between content creation and its distribution. Therefore, the reason is primarily to develop the telecommunications and media business," Kellner said at the time. His group owns the mobile service provider O2 in the Czech Republic and Slovakia, and also owns the fixed line in the Czech Republic.
In addition to PPF, other well-known names were also interested in CME, such as the Czech businessman of Slovak origin, Andrej Babiš, and the Penta investment group. In Slovakia, the latter owns the News and Media Holding (NMH) publishing house, while the law prohibits the cross-ownership of media.
"We had signed a memorandum approved in New York. We had many meetings, we also agreed on the price. In the end, nothing came of it," Penta co-owner Jaroslav Haščák said in an interview with Aktuality.sk.
