France’s industry minister said he had blocked Yahoo Inc.’s plan to buy a majority stake in online video website Dailymotion because the U.S. group wanted to “devour” its smaller competitor, reports The Globe and Mail.
Yahoo, which declined to comment, had been in talks to acquire a 75 per cent stake in Dailymotion, owned by France Telecom’s Orange, a deal that would have valued Europe’s largest video website at $300-million.
The failure of the talks makes for another public knock to France’s business image after verbal attacks last year by Arnaud Montebourg on firms seeking to shut ailing industrial sites prompted international derision.
“I met the Yahoo and Orange chief executives in my office. Yahoo wants to devour Dailymotion, but we told them no and that it had to be a 50:50 split,” Montebourg told Europe 1 radio.
France owns a 27 per cent stake in France Telecom. French government officials had raised concerns that the country would lose control over one of its biggest Internet industry successes if the deal went ahead, sources familiar with the matter said.
Montebourg, one of the government’s most outspoken ministers, is charged with restoring competitiveness to the industrial sector and promoting the “Made in France” brand.
He said that he had wanted Yahoo to follow a model similar to Renault and Nissan, whereby the identities of both firms were retained while they developed their products across the world.
Read more of this Reuters report published by The Globe and Mail.