Axel Springer has struck a €13.5bn (£11.3bn) deal that will see its media assets, which include Politico, Business Insider and newspapers Bild and Die Welt, hived off into a private company with the aim of building an international digital news media powerhouse.
The move will see the German conglomerate, which last year decided against bidding for the Daily and Sunday Telegraph because its focus is a “digital first, digital only” acquisition strategy, become fully privately owned for the first time since its flotation in 1985.
Under the deal announced on Thursday, Axel Springer will be controlled by billionaire Mathias Döpfner and Friede Springer, while private equity group KKR will take majority control of its profitable classifieds business.
KKR became involved in Axel Springer in 2019, when it bought out the company’s minority owners in a deal valuing the company at €6.8bn.
“We want to be faster, more agile and less bureaucratic,” said Döpfner, in a message to staff. “We are digital and transatlantic. But we need to strengthen the role of technology as a critical success factor. We need to understand and harness the power of artificial intelligence faster and better than our competitors.
“We need to become even more market, customer, and revenue-focused than before. These priorities must be our focus if we want to be the leading transatlantic media company for digital journalism and related business models.”
Döpfner added that the deal still requires a legally binding contract to be signed, and approval from regulatory authorities.
Axel Springer, which has been run by the 61-year-old Döpfner since 2002, is also home to assets including business newsletter company Morning Brew and research firm eMarketer. The tabloid Bild is Europe’s biggest selling newspaper.
Springer and Döpfner will together hold close to 98% of the media division, which is valued at €3.5bn.
Döpfner is an avid art collector who created a museum for “freedom inside a villa next to Berlin’s Glienicker Brücke, known from the cold war era as the Bridge of Spies.
In 2019, he held an exhibition of 45 works from his own collection, under the title Nude: Female Bodies by Female Artists.
In 2020, Friede Springer named Döpfner her successor in an arrangement that saw him acquire 4.1% of the stock and be gifted 15%, taking his direct ownership to 22% – and making him a billionaire.
Springer also said that in the future all voting rights attached to her shareholding in the company would be exercised by Döpfner.
The 82-year-old Friede Springer, the widow of founder Axel Springer, whom she fell in love with working as his son’s nanny at the family home, is a close friend of former German chancellor Angela Merkel.
Merkel’s husband, Joachim Sauer, is one of seven members of the board of trustees of the Friede Springer Foundation.
Axel Springer has reshaped its empire in recent years. In 2015, it took full control of Business Insider in a deal that valued the business at $442m, having previously held a 9% stake. The same year, it was pipped by an 11th-hour £844m bid by Nikkei, Japan’s largest media group, to buy the Financial Times.
Five years later, the company acquired business news site Morning Brew before buying political website Politico, which was founded ahead of the 2008 US presidential election by staffers from the Washington Post, for about $1bn.
In 2021, Axel Springer held talks to buy digital news outlet Axios, which was seeking between $400m and $500m, but no deal was reached.
After the announcement on Thursday, KKR and its partner the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPPIB) will become the owner of Axel Springer’s classifieds business, which includes the jobs platform StepStone and real estate advertising operation Aviv, with the German media conglomerate continuing to hold a minority stake.
