BERLIN (Reuters) – German media giant Axel Springer will set up a dedicated mergers and acquisitions team to review companies specializing in artificial intelligence, it said in an employee internal statement seen by Reuters. CEO Matthias Dopfner said in a podcast.
The M&A Competence Center “needs to focus entirely on acquisitions that are important or attractive for Axel Springer for a variety of reasons, including early-stage acquisitions and late-stage acquisitions of AI companies,” Dupfner said.
“Maybe we’ll nominate five times, five times it won’t work,” Dupfner said of a potential takeover. But the strategy could also determine Axel Springer’s next step stone, he added.
If market conditions improve, Axel Springer aims to go public on popular online job portal StepStone this year.
Dopfner said he is particularly interested in AI techniques that seek to disrupt Axel Springer’s advertising, e-commerce and journalism business models.
Like StepStone, AI is a challenger to the company’s traditional newspaper business, he said.
“If someone wants to kill journalism, let us understand how and why and let us journalists do it ourselves.”
The German newspaper with titles such as the mass-published tabloid Bild recently set its sights on the US market with the acquisition of political news outlet Politico.
Reported by Klaus Lauer, Written by Rachel More, Edited by Miranda Murray
Our standards: Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
