Mr. Huntingford: Firstly, I should outline the overall objective that we have for Chrysalis Group, which is to build an integrated, and predominantly rights-based entertainment and media group that can deliver long-term capital value to our shareholders. That's our overriding corporate objective. As a group we operate in four distinct business areas, each of which is headed up by a highly experienced industry entrepreneur. We're in the areas of music, which is the core heritage business of Chrysalis, visual entertainment, media products, and radio. These are the four core areas of activity.
TWST: What about the size and the growth potential of your industry for
those divisions? What are the key trends that you face in the
marketplace today. For example, the growth of the Internet, how has
that affected your business model, and could you appraise the business
climate?
Mr. Huntingford: I think before getting into that, it's important to
understand that Chrysalis as a listed company has undertaken a
transformation over the last half dozen years, by re-building itself
anew and afresh, following the USD 150 million disposal of its original
core records business, Chrysalis Records, to EMI back in the early
1990s. Chrysalis had come to the U.K. stock market in July 1985, when
it was predominantly a record label with operations in the U.K., Europe,
and a sizable label in America. It had many years of success, including
some success in its early years on the market. However, following some
quite sizable losses in its American record label, we took the decision
to start what became a trend of consolidation of record label ownership
by the majors, when EMI and Polygram basically gobbled up the various
independents that had been spawned in the 1970s, the Chrysalises,
Virgins, Islands, A&Ms etc. So that disposal fundamentally changed
Chrysalis in that the core business left the group, and the group almost
became a cash shell. What we did then was to set about building the
broadly based media group that is Chrysalis today, focusing on what we
felt would be fast growing areas of television production, music
publishing and radio. We had shrewdly retained the music publishing
catalogue at the time of the sale of the record label to EMI and that
really formed the platform for rebuilding the business.
Tickers included in this excerpt: CHS.L
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