At least three serious candidates for the takeover of Drouot-SA regrouping some 70 auctioning offices have made sensible offers during the second half of January. The reform of the auctioning profession in France has created a strong incentive among financial groups regarding the control of the Drouot salesrooms and its weekly magazine “La Gazette de l'Hôtel Drouot”, now rich with some 60,000 suscribers.
Pierre Bergé, head of the Yves Saint-Laurent Haute Couture group, was the first to make a firm offer last month for Drouot with a view of achieving unity among the Paris auctioning groups, which urgently need to yield forces in order to resist the challenge of Anglo-Saxon auction houses now allowed to hold sales in the French capital.
However, Bergé is no longer the only one interested in Drouot following offers made by Barclays Equity France and the Rothschild and Company bank based in London and headed by David de Rothschild.
Gonzague de Blignières, head of the board of Barclays Equity France (BPE), said he was only interested in acquiring Drouot S.A while Bergé's aim is to bring the 70 auctioning groups under his wing.
The choice that Parisian auctioneers have to make seems quite hard since
the ambitions of the candidates for the take-over of Drouot are not heading in the same direction. On the one side, Pierre Bergé offers the stature of a man who has nurtured a great passion for art but he is known to be quite inflexible as a manager. On the other side, the financial groups interested in Drouot S.A might simply have a leaning for results meaning that they would not adopt a human approach vis-à-vis auctioneers who have been used to working according to old-fashioned rules notwithstanding the fact that they have gained the reputation of forming a motley collection living in a kind of Tower of Babel, thus lacking unity.
Still, many auctioneers have indicated that they were not tempted to work under the management of Pierre Bergé because he is known as acting as a kind of ruler. In addition, his offer for Drouot seems less advantageous on paper than the one made by BPE while Rothschild and Company has not yet disclosed the terms of its proposal. Want it or not, a brutal revolution is under way for Drouot and it seems that most auctionners have been experiencing difficulties to adapt to a new situation especially as they did all they could during many years to block the reform. Now forced to make quick and crucial choices they are at a loss regarding which solution seems the best.
BPE does not want to affect the functioning of auction groups in making an offer of 914 000€ per share of the Drouot Holding, apparently more interesting than the
609 000 € proposal by Pierre Bergé. BPE's offer is however only made on Drouot SA, which owns the assets of the Company of auctioneers, the Gazette de l'Hôtel Drouot weekly magazine and the (rent) leases for the Drouot-Richelieu, Drouot-Montaigne and Drouot-Nord salesrooms.
Most coveted is the Gazette with its 60,000 suscribers, a magazine for which offers were also made by artprice.com and reportedly by the Hachette-Filipacchi-Media group. However, in such context, the price to pay seems terribly heavy for such magazine, which has an outdated lay-out and a somewhat bizarre editorial content mixing a few features and scores of sales results rarely analysed that thus often leave readers to draw their own conclusions regarding bids achieved.
Any major publisher would be better off if he decided to create his own magazine dedicated to auction sales with the help of a much competent editorial team. However, such new weekly would have to stage at least a two-year battle to win over the traditional advertisers of La Gazette, which holds a predominant position on the French art market. Neverthless, one does not see why such publication should have no rival as it must normally be regarded as any other press magazine liable to face competition in its domain.
The Barclays Private Equity (BPE) group indicated it wanted to boost the value of Drouot S.A to 68,6 millions € against 46 millions € as set in Pierre Bergé's project whereas Parisian auctioneers would be allowed to enter its capital against an entry fee of 655 957€ with a view to drawing annual dividends.
Pierre Bergé's greatest merit has been to shake off auctioneers from their apparent apathy as they will be sooner or later forced to regroup meaning that only some 15 entities will remain finally active on the art market. His vision is quite different from that professed by BPE as his ambition is above all to reinforce Drouot in order to remain competitive in the face of the Anglo-Saxon challenge in Paris.
His strong point is that he wants to protect and develop the Drouot trademark but today it is up to the 70 Parisian auction groups to decide quickly about their future.
Adrian Darmon
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