Guardian
Chris Tryhorn, City correspondent
Wednesday September 28, 2005
Endemol, the company behind Big Brother and The Games, today confirmed that its owner had decided to float between 20% and 30% of the TV production giant.
Spanish telecoms giant Telefonica, which has owned Dutch-based Endemol for five years, will float the minority stake on the Amsterdam Euronext exchange in an IPO expected later this year.
"The board of Endemol, its operating companies and all our staff are very pleased with this news," Endemol said in a statement. "It is the result of hard work by our employees worldwide."
Telefonica - the largest telecoms and internet group in the Spanish and Portuguese speaking world - paid 5.5bn euros (£3.74bn) in shares to buy Endemol in 2000, just as the Big Brother phenomenon was taking off across the world.
As one of the few production companies able to sell its formats worldwide, Endemol was an attractive asset to pick up.
Selling off non-core assets
But under its chairman, Cesar Alierta, Telefonica has focused on its telecoms operations and jettisoned some of the non-core assets built up during the dotcom era such as the internet search firm Lycos and a stake in the Financial Times owner Pearson.
After deciding Endemol was non-core, Mr Alierta announced a partial spin-off in February, and today confirmed the size of the stake that will be floated.
The flotation would earn the company's UK head, Peter Bazalgette, a sizeable fortune from his shareholding in the group.
In the UK the company is behind shows such as Five's The Farm, Ready Steady Cook on BBC1 and BBC2's Restoration. Endemol has produced some of BBC's biggest lifestyle series, including Changing Rooms, Ground Force and Food & Drink.
Endemol UK's earlier incarnation, Broadcast Communications, was once part of the Guardian Media Group (GMG), which owns the Guardian and the Observer as well as MediaGuardian.co.uk.
The Dutch group Endemol bought a 50% stake in 1998, then two years later picked up the remaining half of the business from GMG.
