You are viewing your 1 free article this month. Login to read more articles.
The Paris Commercial Court has authorised the French investment fund Financière Trésor de Patrimoine to take over the bankrupt book club France Loisirs, which is owned by holding company Actissia.
The move on 13th December ends uncertainty over the company’s liquidation, but means that only 14 of the 122 club’s boutiques and 22 “corners” in other stores around France will stay in business, Actissia chairman Adrian Diaconu told The Bookseller. About 600 employees will be laid off, leaving 150 to run the remaining boutiques and four service companies. Media group Reworld also bid for the club.
The court first approved a recovery plan for France Loisirs at the beginning of 2019, but before it could consolidate its new structure and strategy Covid-19 struck—reducing the number of retail outlets, laying off staff and concentrating almost exclusively on books.
Sales fell by 20% between 2019 and 2020, and another 22% year on year by 13th December, Diaconu said. Towards the end of 2020, he thought the company would pull through, but France’s second lockdown in November and the bleak first half of 2021 were devastating. “We had all the ingredients to survive,” he said in a telephone interview.
Diaconu ploughed €30m of his own capital into France Loisirs to help keep it afloat, and needed another €2 to €5m, depending on how the numbers were calculated. “Like any hole, if you don’t plug it immediately, it gets bigger,’ he said.
In September 2020, the club introduced a new subscription system, replacing compulsory purchases with a monthly subscription of €3.99 and a 30% cut in the retail price of its selected titles that are not covered by the Lang Law limiting discounts to 5%. The new system attracted a record 13,000 new members the following month.
State guaranteed loans at the end of 2020 had wiped out most of France Loisirs’ €12m loss. But the downward spiral continued this year with losses of €10m in the first half of this year and another €6.3m in July and August.
The future remains uncertain for France Loisirs’ 10 boutiques in Belgium and three in Quebec, Diaconu said. The situation is “complicated,” he added.
He has spent six years trying to salvage France Loisirs, and has worked full-time “day and night” with back office staff since May. “The team has a start-up mentality, but we were too slow (to act) because we lacked cashflow.”
Diaconu will help the buyer with France Loisirs’ transition, and says he has other projects in progress. These involve artificial intelligence, robotics, and include the C’Lire reader community app. Actissia also owns chapitre.com, an online outlet for cut-price new, second-hand, antiquarian and e-books, and the French literary magazine Books.