WAZ Sells Stake in Albania’s Vizion Plus

Germany’s WAZ Media Group has sold its stake in Albania’s broadcaster Vizion Plus TV back to its previous owners, the latest move as the company pulls out of the Balkan region.

Besar Likmeta

BIRN

Tirana WAZ’s stake in Vizion Plus has been acquired by the minority stakeholders in the company, the Dulaku Borthers, Tirana-based construction tycoons who also founded Vizion Plus’s parent company, Mediavizion.
WAZ controlled 67 per cent of Mediavizion from 2009. Until its recent sale it was the only foreign media group present in the Albanian media market.
A spokesperson for WAZ confirmed the sale to Balkan Insight but declined to comment on the reasons behind the company’s move. In the last two years the German company has downsized operations in Southeast Europe.
In July WAZ sold its 50-per-cent share in Politika, Serbia's oldest newspaper to Moscow-based OOO East Media Group. Politika is now owned 50 per cent by the Serbian state and 50 per cent by the Russian company.

In January, WAZ Media Group sold its three Macedonian newspapers to Orka, a local company owned by Orce Kamcev.

The three dailies, Dnevnik, Utrinski Vesnik and Vest, which hold a considerable share of the newspaper market, were the only ones in the country owned by a big international media company.
In 2010 WAZ's director Bodo Hombach announced that WAZ intended to withdraw from the Balkans, blaming abuse of power and collusion between governments and oligarchs for hampering the media group's business operations.
That year, WAZ sold off some of its main newpapers in Romania and Bulgaria.
The WAZ Media Group is active in Germany, Austria, Croatia, Hungary, Russia and Serbia. The group owns 24 daily newspapers with a circulation of over 2.5 million copies, 13 weekly newspapers, 175 popular magazines and trade journals, 99 advertising journals, and approximately 400 customer magazines, printed by the group’s own printing operations at 12 locations in Europe.