Yahoo's Deal To Buy A $200M Stake In Dailymotion From Orange Scuppered By French Government

It looks like lightening has struck on the towers of Dailymotion. Yahoo’s bid to take a $200 million majority stake in the video site — known as the ‘YouTube of France’ — has been killed by the French government, which decided that it didn’t want a U.S. company to take a controlling stake in a French operation, TechCrunch has confirmed with a source close to the situation. Rumors of problems with the deal have been swirling around for weeks now. At first it looked like the issues were because of internal disagreements at Yahoo, according to Business Insider. But a report in the French newspaper Le Monde last week noted that Orange had suspended the deal because of opposition from the French state, which owns 27% of the telecom company. We have confirmed with someone close to the deal that the latter is indeed the case. Our source said that Arnaud Montebourg, the French Minister of Industrial Renewal, effectively told Orange that it could not go through with the deal. “Dailymotion is considered a marquee company in France’s technology industry,” the source said. “Hence, Montebourg didn’t want to let it go to the Americans. He wanted anchorage to stay in France. It’s a shame because all of the growth at Dailymotion is international. It would have been in the best interests of the company. It’s stunning, really.” St?phane Richard who wants to stay at the head of Orange for another term didn’t want to go through with the deal. In the meantime, Dailymotion won’t be able to keep up with the competition — and especially YouTube — if Orange is not ready to invest more capital in Dailymotion. The end to the Yahoo deal will have a couple of ramifications. For one, Dailymotion will likely now have to raise money from somewhere — France Telecom or the French government, or perhaps from a national business — in order to invest in its platform. Les Echos estimates that the sum will need to be in the region of ?50 million ($65 million). The alternative to that is to seek out another buyer, probably in France, who would be interested in buying most of France Telecom’s stake, since the carrier had already made it clear that it intended to divest itself of most of that stake when it took it on earlier this year. It’s not clear which company would be a

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/-jPgMslkCyA/

2013 Calendar chris christie sofia vergara American Horror Story Patti Page anonymous texas chainsaw massacre