Media print
| Mediaprint newspaper and magazine publisher GmbH & Co KG
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| legal form | GmbH & Co. KG |
| founding | 1988 |
| Seat | Vienna , Austria |
| management | Monika Fuhrheer, Thomas Kralinger, Christoph Niemöller |
| Number of employees | 1,382 (2018) |
| sales | 428.5 million euros (2016/17) |
| Branch | publishing company |
| Website | www.mediaprint.at |
The Media Print GmbH & Co KG is the largest Austrian newspaper and magazine publisher and is jointly owned by the German Funke Media Group (formerly Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung (WAZ)), the banking group Raiffeisen and the estate of Hans Dichand . Founded in 1988 as a merger of the Kronen Zeitung and KURIER publishers , Mediaprint takes care of their newspaper business concerns in the areas of advertising, printing and sales.
The publisher is the market leader in the daily newspaper sector. The two newspapers Kronen Zeitung and Kurier Kurier cover 35.3 percent of the public market, in eastern Austria even significantly more. With a total turnover of 428.5 million euros in the 2016/17 financial year, the Mediaprint Group is the second largest Austrian media company after Österreichischer Rundfunk (ORF).
In 2001, Mediaprint became involved in the ownership of the largest magazine group in Austria, the NEWS group . The magazine publisher of the Kurier with titles such as profil or trend merged with the magazine publisher News, with titles such as News , Format or Woman . The resulting conglomerate is also known as the "Mediamil complex".
The enterprise
The history of the founding of Mediaprint is closely linked to the personal and business feud between Hans Dichand and Kurt Falk , who jointly held the shares in the Kronen Zeitung until the 1980s . In the course of a legal dispute, a settlement was made, according to which Dichand should be given the chance to pay off Kurt Falk with outside capital. After negotiations with several Austrian investors and banks, Dichand and the German WAZ media group reached an agreement in 1988 on a price of 1.6 billion Schillings (around 220.6 million euros today ) for 45% of the Kronen Zeitung. The remaining five percentage points of Falk's shares were bought by Dichand himself. The WAZ now holds 50% of the newspaper.
Only a few months later, the WAZ also got involved in the then second largest newspaper in Austria, the Kurier, and its magazine group. WAZ paid 80 million schillings for 45 percent of the shares . At that time, the Kurier Group included some of the most successful magazines, such as profil, trend, Wochenpresse , Rennbahn-Express and Basta .
The WAZ endeavored to establish models for cooperation between the two newspapers. So the subsidiary Mediaprint was founded, whose executive floor was provided with representatives from Krone, Kurier and WAZ . Since then, the group's products have been using three joint printing centers in Vienna- Inzersdorf , Salzburg and St. Andrä (Carinthia) and are cooperating in sales. According to current antitrust law, this merger would probably not have been approved. In 2001 a somewhat stricter amendment came into force, but the conglomerate cannot be broken down retrospectively.
Due to its sheer size and dominant market position, Mediaprint can, according to a textbook by the Ministry of Education, “dictate tariffs, operate with competitive prices and, in extreme cases, ruin local competitors and small media”.
Mediamil complex: Mediaprint and news group
The antitrust court (see Federal Competition Authority) approved the next step in the entanglement of ownership between the largest players in the print landscape in 2001. The Kurier magazine publisher took a 30% stake in the news group. Since then, the Kurier-Verlag magazines have also appeared in the news group. Only the editorial company of the profil is an independent subsidiary of the Kurier - it was not allowed to be incorporated into the group as a condition of the court. On an economic level - especially in sales - the publisher's products have since followed a common strategy. The only thing that changed noticeably after the merger was the weekly magazine Format, which was transformed from a general interest magazine into a business magazine in order not to be in competition with the profile . In 2016, the News publishing group (VGN) merged its business magazines "Trend" and "Format". Since then, the weekly magazine has been published under the title "Trend".
The Ministry of Economics and Justice were party to the arbitration proceedings - neither raised an objection. The Austrian antitrust law defines a dominant position in the media sector with the fact that a group of companies gains 30% of the total advertising market. The owner consortium submitted a market analysis to the court, according to which the new magazine group covers only 17% of the total advertising market in the magazine sector. According to data from MediaWatch (a subsidiary of the Austria Press Agency ) it is around 60%. The antitrust court found that the group covered 29.42% of the magazine advertising market and approved the merger subject to conditions.
The decision of the cartel court is controversial. This is mainly because the judgment is based on contradictions. In its verdict, the Senate, consisting of a professional judge and two lay judges, stated that the merger "leads to a monopoly-like dominance of the reader market with regard to political news magazines, but not to a dominance of the advertising market, although it is undisputed that already dominance of one of the two markets can justify the prohibition of the merger ”. Furthermore, in the judgment there is an "extremely threatening [...] dominance of the reader market in connection with the postulate of maintaining the media and diversity of opinion, which is not eliminated by the promise of continuation even if an independent editorial staff is maintained." Rather, it is to be feared that "in less and less media, including the daily newspapers Neue Kronen Zeitung and Kurier, critical reporting will occur if the economic interests of even one of the parent companies are affected". The merger is described critically over several pages in the judgment and presented as unfavorable in terms of democratic politics. In the surprising last paragraph, the conglomerate is finally approved without any specific justification. In newspaper reports, the court's decision was repeatedly stated that the lay judges nominated on the basis of social partnership from the Chamber of Commerce and Labor had ultimately overruled the professional judge.
Just as in the case of Mediaprint, the merger was followed by a reform of antitrust law, according to which such a merger would probably no longer be approved.
Publications of the group
Daily newspapers
Weekly magazines
- Rieder magazine
Locations
Around 15 million newspapers are printed every week at the three Mediaprint printing sites in Vienna , Salzburg and Sankt Andrä (Carinthia) . Every week over 1,465 tons of newsprint, more than 36,000 printing plates and around 24,000 kg of ink are used for this.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b Article In: Der Standard , March 8, 2012.
- ↑ Source: Media Analysis 2017
- ↑ Peter Plainker: The media landscape between Danube-Wasserkopf and Alpen-Herrgotswinkel. In: Peter Filzmaier u. a .: Media democracy Austria. Böhlau, Vienna 2006, p. 198.
- ↑ Source: Top 10 media companies in Austria. In: medianet.at, April 13, 2018, p. 61
- ↑ Erwin Zankel: The ideal of the public law claim and the sobering reality. In: Peter Filzmaier u. a .: Media democracy Austria. Böhlau, Vienna 2006, p. 164.
- ↑ Andy Kaltenbrunner, Susanne Krucsay (ed.): Print media in Austria. Working materials for media education. Ed .: Federal Ministry for Education and Cultural Affairs . Vienna 1997, p. 49.
- ↑ [1]
- ^ Andy Kaltenbrunner: Media Policy. In: Emmerich Talos (Hrsg.): Black-Blue, A balance of the "new government". LIT-Verlag, Vienna 2006, p. 132.
- ^ In: Die Presse , February 17, 2001, p. 33.
- ↑ See Die Presse , February 17, 2001, p. 33; Kleine Zeitung , February 27, 2001, p. 4; Der Standard , March 19, 2001, p. 13.
- ↑ Thomas Steinmaurer: Concentrated and entwined. Austria's media system at a glance. Studienverlag, Innsbruck 2002, p. 40.