Terra Firma, the private equity owner of record label EMI, is close to selling a 15 percent stake in the company for £250 million ($513 million), reports the Times of London. The report comes a couple days after FT reported that the company had been rebuffed in its attempts to access the debt markets for capital. It’s not known who would be buying the stake, but what’s interesting are the firm’s aggressive predictions for how fast it can grow the company. According to documents seen by the Times, Terra Firma says it can grow music profits from £61 ($125 million) million this year to £528 million ($1.02 billion) by 2012, through a combination of aggressive cost-cutting and outgrowing the market. Specifically, it’s calling for a £341 million boost from higher margins on internet and mobile revenues. It’s hard to say how much of this prediction is grounded in reality and how much is puffery, but such a sharp surge might come as a surprise to Warner Music Group, (NYSE: WMG) which yesterday reported slowing digital growth and disappointing mobile revenue. WMG hopes things will turn around, but in the meantime, it’s spreading its bets into areas that aren’t tied to the sale of music.
Subscriber content
?
Subscriber content comes from Gigaom Research, bridging the gap between breaking news and long-tail research. Visit any of our reports to learn more and subscribe.
Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement
Comments have been disabled for this post