Exor, here’s how Elkann trashes newspapers and focuses on health care
Exor sells newspapers and advances in healthcare: it bought a share in Philips for 2.6 billion euros. It's just the latest investment in an industry that, according to John Elkann, is set to grow. All the details
Exor, the Dutch holding company led by John Elkann and owner of the Gedi publishing group (but also of Stellantis, Juventus, Cnh Industrial and more), seems to want to detach itself from the newspapers: about ten days ago it signed an agreement to sell to Athesis La Gazzetta di Mantova , and last week it signed another to sell North East Multimedia Il Mattino di Padova , La Tribuna di Treviso, La Nuova di Venezia and Mestre, Il Corriere delle Alpi, Il Messaggero Veneto, Il Piccolo and Northeast Economy .
Moving away from publishing seems to correspond to a move towards the health technology industry. In fact, today Exor announced that it had purchased a 15 percent stake in Philips for 2.6 billion euros, already anticipating the possibility of bringing it up to a maximum of 20 percent. Philips, a former Dutch electronics conglomerate, began a spin-off process a decade ago to focus on healthcare technologies such as scanning machines and sensors for monitoring patients.
WHAT ELKANN THINKS ABOUT HEALTHCARE
The healthcare industry is one of Exor's new focuses, attracting investments of almost 1 billion euros last year.
In the last letter to the shareholders, the managing director John Elkann wrote that in 2022 the holding company had "deepened its knowledge in the health sector and has invested almost one billion euros", and that healthcare is "a sector that will continue to grow over the next few decades, to respond to the needs of an aging global population […]. In a world with a growing and longer-lived population, there is an increasing need to reduce costs and improve the quality of healthcare systems, thus creating attractive opportunities for the use of capital”.
ALL OF EXOR'S HEALTHCARE INVESTMENTS
The Agnelli family vehicle has already invested in Institut Mérieux (a French holding company that manages several healthcare technology companies such as BioMérieux, Mérieux NutriSciences, Transgene and Advanced BioScience) and in Lifenet Healthcare (an Italian healthcare group that owns hospitals, outpatient centers and eye clinics).
Exor owns 10 percent of Institut Mérieux (4 billion turnover in 2021 ), 45 percent of Lifenet Healthcare (led by Nicola Bedin , ex-CEO of San Donato Hospital Group and San Raffaele Hospital) and, through the Exor Ventures division, it is supporting the development of emerging companies in the healthcare technology sector.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/economia/exor-philips/ on Mon, 14 Aug 2023 11:46:08 +0000.