Regional business summary: Latin America

The purchase of periodicals had a prominent place on the business agenda. Four major deals were closed, all of which involved foreign investors divesting themselves of their stakes. That was the case of the Recoletos group, which gave up its businesses in Argentina after five years. The transactions had a common denominator: they all involved local investors that already owned shares in one or more communications companies.

These purchases, together with other expansions, increased concentration in the communications industry: Chile’s El Mercurio added two regional dailies, the Colombian company Editorial El Tiempo (CEET, in its Spanish acronym), bought Cambio magazine, and the Argentine Clarín group created the first regional cable television network, to cite a few examples.

Product re-design showed a strong multimedia slant: in most cases, it affected not only newspapers, but also websites. Some companies additionally decided to invest in internal restructuring to progress toward greater synergy among their various platforms.

The launching of new products was not a major activity for dailies. Rather, such initiatives were concentrated in magazines or specific publishing launches aimed at capturing consumer niches, the expansion of service-related businesses such as broadcasting news to mobile telephones or the diversification of online products.