Jean-Martial Lefranc has been waiting patiently for his moment for weeks. Since the launch of Marianne In mid-April, the 62-year-old from Lille informed the CMI group, owned by the Czech energy magnate, Daniel Kretinsky, who is also a creditor of Releaseits interest in buying the sovereignist weekly magazine. Its offer has long been considered too financially fragile by CMI and the employees of Marianneespecially compared to that of billionaire Pierre-Edouard Stérin, in pole position on this issue until a spectacular turnaround by the editorial staff at the end of June. After abandoning discussions with the businessman close to the National Rally, Jean-Martial Lefranc returned to the game, to the point of obtaining the opening of exclusive negotiations with CMI this Thursday, July 18 for the acquisition of the magazine. If Marianne would then certainly constitute his most notable acquisition to date, the man is not a novice in the press.
From video games to cinema
A graduate of a Master’s degree in law from Sciences-Po Paris, Jean-Martial Lefranc, a jack-of-all-trades, has divided his career between cinema, video games and the media. Passions that can be found in his holding company Financière de Loisirs, a company that publishes several specialist magazines. Among these titles that have nothing to do with each other, we can also spot Beef ! meat-oriented, the monthly cinema The Fantastic Screen or Retro Games Collectionfor those nostalgic for old-school video games. From the end of the 80s, Jean-Martial Lefranc became interested in the media, notably taking over the management of the antenna of the very short-lived channel TV6. More recently, in 2018, he was also president of the union of independent press publishers (SAEP).
His entrepreneurial beginnings, however, date back to 1992: Jean-Martial Lefranc then launched into the production and design of video games. A successful bet. His company Cryo Interactive Entertainment entered the Paris Stock Exchange in 1998. Having gone through a legal battle with Canal + over the creation of a “Second World” based on CD-Roms (a sort of metaverse of the 90s), Jean-Martial Lefranc also launched a subsidiary, called Cryonetworks, intended to exploit the online gaming activity. He even joined forces, at the turn of the 2000s, with Bac Majestic, a producer and operator of movie theaters. Financially fragile, Jean-Martial Lefranc finally got out of it by selling Cryo in 2002. This allowed him to bounce back, this time in the world of cinema. In addition to producing feature films, this admirer of Costa-Gavras tries his hand at writing and even directing, notably with The Balance of Terror in 2006.
“Constant creativity”
In the media, he attempted his first big move in 2008. Jean-Martial Lefranc was one of the candidates who wanted to buy THE Cinema Notebooks to the group the world. Without success. So he consoled himself, a year later, by buying (still from the same group) the children’s publisher Fleurus presse. Lower printing costs, drastic reduction in employees… Jean-Martial Lefranc thoroughly restructured the publisher then made a capital gain by selling it a few years later, in 2015, to the Unique Heritage Media group. A shift that he would like to repeat with Marianne ? Its offer, raised to 8.5 million euros, is supported by several investors: Philippe Corrot, founder of the unicorn Mirakl, a publisher of marketplace platforms, Henri de Bodinat, former boss of Sony Music and Club Med, who also relaunched the magazine Current with Jean-François Bizot in 1979, and finally the thirty-something businessman Joan Beaufort, who made his fortune in digital marketing and video games.
“The best guarantee of the sustainability of a press title is to implement the practice that I have been pursuing for almost twenty years in this area: scrupulous respect for the title’s DNA and constant creativity in the evolution of its business model,” wrote Jean-Martial Lefranc in an email to the editorial staff at the end of June. His offer would thus be accompanied by a non-replacement of the departing journalists thanks to the transfer clause (a mechanism specific to the press which authorizes journalists to leave the company with compensation in the event of a change of shareholder). This worries the magazine’s employees: Jean-Martial Lefranc, “It would be rather good for the independence of Mariannebut dangerous for its economic survival,” an employee recently explained.
Source: www.liberation.fr
