The AFP board of directors re -elected the manager on Thursday for a five -year term at the head of the press agency whose accounts he straightened up.
by Aude Dassonville
Almost a formality. Fabrice Fries, the president of the France-Presse agency (AFP) since April 2018, has been renewed for a second five-year term by a vote by the board of directors (CA) gathered Thursday, November 10 afternoon.
In an internal email entitled “Stop or even”, sent a month ago, the manager had informed the employees of his desire to continue his task at the head of the organization with missions of general interest – financed for one third by the State. The manager collected 14 positive votes (13 were necessary), for four abstentions and no vote against. If the vote had been negative, a call for candidates would have been launched. His new mandate will start at the expiration of the previous one, April 15, 2023.
Administrators will no doubt have been sensitive to the sanitation of the company’s financial situation at 2,400 employees (including 1,700 journalists) who will generate 320 million euros in turnover in 2022 (207 million commercial revenues, 113 million state support). Appointed in 2018 after the withdrawal of Emmanuel Hoog’s candidacy, his predecessor, Fabrice Fries, 62, can indeed boast of having put AFP “on track, regaining growth, profitability and attractiveness”. p>
“There will be no new departure plan”
“This is the story of a very rapid financial reversal,” he told the world. Upon his arrival, this enarque passed through the Court of Auditors, the Vivendi group, Atos and Publicis Consultants (which he presided over), had found accounts in the red (20 million euros in losses between 2014 and 2018) . That year, the Court of Auditors estimated that the management of the company was picked up by excess of expenses and insufficient commercial developments. Two faults that Mr. Fries has strived to erase: in the record he provided to his CA, and that Le Monde was able to consult, the manager welcomes to have “content” the progress of the charges (by The means of a departure plan for 90 people, and a real estate rationalization that saved a saving of 3 million euros) and “expanded the product portfolio” with the development of the video offer and the digital investigation. The hardest thing remains to come, however: this time, warns the CEO, “we are going to do lace” to stay profitable.
The triggering of the war in Ukraine has indeed come to complicate an already difficult equation. On the one hand, media turnover (130 million euros) has been down for three years; On the other, “personnel charges” (three -quarters of operating expenses) mechanically increase by 3 million euros annually. Since the beginning of the year, we must also fight against the increase in energy prices, the appreciation of the dollar in the face of the euro, while composing with the economic weakening of the press publishers (dependent on the Increase in paper prices) or the threats weighing on fact-checking activities paid by Meta. “While AFP will have experienced strong growth in its income in 2021 (+ 4.2 %) and 2022 (+ 5.1 % projected), the progression will probably be more measured in the future,” he wrote to Administrators, many questions of which focused on the risk of dependence on the agency at GAFAM (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft), which are currently going through a difficult pass.
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