Media

“Everybody’s Very, Very Positive About This”: Fortune’s New Buyer Isn’t Marc Benioff—But for $150 Million, Who Cares!

Thai billionaire Chatchaval Jiaravanon had a hankering for an iconic print brand, and in these trying times for media, that’s essentially the best type of buyer that iconic print brands can hope for.
magazine on a shop shelf
Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton on the covers of Newsweek and Fortune in 2007.By Francis Dean/REX/Shutterstock.

In September, when Meredith Corporation announced it had reached a $190 million deal to sell Time magazine to Salesforce C.E.O. Marc Benioff and his wife, Lynne, there was a palpable sense of disappointment among employees of Fortune, Time’s sister title. Both publications were part of Meredith’s acquisition of Time Inc. in early 2018, and when Meredith, as expected, put them up for sale shortly thereafter, both also harbored high hopes for white knights. Benioff, as I’ve previously reported, was originally in talks to buy Fortune, and the staff was excited about that. But the Fortune talks fizzled out, and in a last minute twist, the Benioffs ended up buying Time instead.

On Friday morning, though, after a sale process that dragged on considerably longer than anyone had initially expected, the Fortune crew finally got a savior of its own: Thai businessman Chatchaval Jiaravanon, who has agreed to pay $150 million for the storied business magazine, which laid the foundation for the Time Inc. empire when it was founded by Henry Luce in 1929. Jiaravanon, or “Chat,” as his nickname goes, may not be Silicon Valley royalty—in fact he may not even be someone that your average media professional had ever heard of, let alone journalists at Fortune, who have never covered him. But he’s nonetheless a billionaire with a hankering for an iconic print brand, and in these trying times for media, that’s essentially the best type of buyer that iconic print brands can hope for.

Jiaravanon is part of the family that owns the Thai conglomerate Charoen Pokphand Group, but he’s buying Fortune individually. He has promised a laissez-faire management approach, editorial independence, investment, and the continuity of the existing leadership team, including Alan Murray as president and, now, C.E.O., with Clifton Leaf as editor in chief. “The early indication is that everybody’s very, very positive about this,” a Fortune editor told me, “because it’s a very similar setup to the Benioff arrangement. The only thing that makes it less attractive is that we don’t know this guy like we know Marc.”

The Jiaravanon deal came together in a light-speed 21 days, an ironic twist considering that the entire sale stretched on for some nine months. (“To everyone I’ve been telling since June that we were two weeks away from a deal, I apologize,” Murray joked on a brief Friday-morning conference call with employees.) In recent weeks, sources had been telling me that British investor Ian Osborne was still believed to be the front-runner. But Jiaravanon swooped in with strong unsolicited interest at the eleventh hour. He was introduced to Murray last month by a mutual acquaintance, and before long, intermediaries had flown out to New York to start negotiating. Jiaravanon is expected to come to New York in December to meet with Fortune’s staff at its current offices inside Meredith’s headquarters at 225 Liberty Street. (Fortune and Time are both on the hunt for new digs.) A more thorough staff meeting addressing the sale is being planned for next week. As I reported in August, Fortune editors have for some time been envisioning a makeover that would reboot Fortune’s print component as more of a luxury product, with a premium price point and perhaps fewer issues. The hope now is that Jiaravanon’s deep pockets will finally make that possible.

On Friday’s call, Murray and Leaf talked up the extent to which Fortune’s rich history and global cachet had dazzled their new owner. But one presumes Jiaravanon was just as enthused about Fortune’s presence in Asia, where the publication has an English-language edition, a Chinese edition, and several news-making conferences. Having suffered the same advertising and newsstand declines as the rest of the industry, Fortune has had to diversify its revenue in recent years, and from a business standpoint, its events division is seen as a major bright spot. People familiar with Fortune’s finances have told me that the most successful conferences of the bunch are the ones in China, where the Jiaravanon family, who are ethnic Chinese, have extensive interests. On the phone from Hong Kong, where Murray and Jiaravanon had dined to celebrate the deal, Murray told me Fortune would earn $10 million this year on $100 million in revenue, and that more than half of those earnings would come from conferences and digital initiatives.

With Fortune and Time out the door, Meredith has now completed two sales, totaling $340 million, out of the four former Time Inc. titles it had put on the block. (Meredith’s interest in Time Inc. was driven by People, which is a perennial moneymaker, and a bevy of softer lifestyle titles, like Southern Living and Real Simple, that mesh with the Meredith portfolio.) That leaves Sports Illustrated and Money. The latter publication was originally being pitched as a package deal with Fortune. Then, an investor group led by the businessman Dan Gilbert emerged as suitors of a Sports Illustrated-Money combo. When I asked someone familiar with the process if the Gilbert talks were still in the works, that person replied, “I wouldn’t waste a lot of time trying to track that down.” A Meredith spokesman said the company is currently in exclusive negotiations with one buyer for Sports Illustrated and another for Money. Meredith has said it hopes to finalize all the deals by year’s end.

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