Placed in receivership, last June 25, for cessation of payment dated May 31, 2019, the France-Antilles Group which publishes the daily newspapers of Guadeloupe, Martinique and Guyana, as well as twenty supplements, risk of put the key under the door. In a long press release, Frédéric Verbrugghe, managing director of France-Antilles, explained the reasons for these difficulties and the possible solutions.
For Frédéric Verbrugghe, the company, its organization and its priorities have not evolved quickly enough in this sector of the regional daily press (PQR). A sector which has been very strongly impacted in recent years by technological and societal transformations. Despite the considerable financial efforts made by the shareholder for two years to boost sales and overcome this situation, this was not enough.
The France-Antilles Group must also face a market reality specific to the Antilles-Guyana, a particular handicap which crystallizes between a potential readership, limited by its territory and its demographic curve, but also a constrained advertising market, "which makes the economic equation impossible with regard to the technical and human means necessary to manufacture, print, distribute and market a daily newspaper ”.
A hearing must be held at the end of October at the Commercial Court of Fort-de-France and Frédéric Verbrugghe considers that "everyday life can die (...) If we do not quickly find an effective remedy for these problems". A deep reorganization will be necessary, but painful and socially difficult, says the director general of France-Antilles, because it will be necessary to reduce the workforce. While specifying that the edition of a daily newspaper in each of the three departments "is, and will remain, structurally in deficit".
Solutions exist, assures Frédéric Verbrugghe, and “in all cases, we must mobilize public funding, local authorities, State, and private, to make possible the reorganization and the restarting of the business (…) Without new funding is the disappearance of France-Antilles and France-Guyane in the very near future ”. And to conclude that the countdown has started and that the possible disappearance of the three dailies "will leave a lasting void in three French departments".
Three takeover offers have been made, for now, but the best proposal would only save 10% of the employees of France-Antilles which employs a total of 282 people._RM
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