Cisneros Group: Overview

overview

The Cisneros group is a South American beverage, retail and broadcasting conglomerate with substantial US television interests. As of 2002 it claimed annual revenues of US$4 billion across 39 countries.

the group

The Venezuela-based Cisneros group is the largest shareholder of Univision Communications, in which Mexico's Televisa had a 12% stake as of 2005. Univision includes the US coast-to-coast Univision broadcast tv network, the Galavision Spanish-language cable tv network in the US, Spanish-language recording and publishing operations and the Univision.com portal.

Cisneros owns Venevisión, the leading commercial tv network in Venezuela. It is a partner with AOL Time Warner in America Online Latin America, an ISP operating as AOL Brasil, AOL Mexico, AOL Argentina and AOL Puerto Rico.

It is a partner in South American satellite broadcaster DIRECTV Latin America, claiming over 1.6 million subscribers for over 300 video and audio channels. It has a stake in Ibero-American Media Partners (IAMP), owner of video program developer Claxson Interactive which provides 14 pay television channels in South America.

Cisneros owns the Los Leones del Caracas baseball team in Venezuela. It also owns Pueblo Xtra International, a food retail and video chain in Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands, and Venezuelan brewery Regional. It has stakes in Panamco, the largest Coca-Cola bottler outside the US, the Spalding sporting goods company and Evenflo, a maker of infant products.

Expansion outside Venezuela reflects prudent diversification and the richness of overseas markets, particularly for Hispanic content in the US.

It also reflects increasing political instability at home, particularly as Hugo Chavez channels Juan Peron. In 2006 Chavez, with characteristic hyperbole, accused the broadcasters of waging a "psychological war" against his administration, describing Venevisión, Globovisión, Televen and RCTV as "horsemen of the apocalypse". He thereupon refused to renew the broadcasting licence of RCTV, which had been more critical than the Cisneros group.

Univision

The first Spanish-language television stations in the US were established in 1961 as part of Televisa's Spanish International Network (SIN), structured to get around restrictions on foreign ownership of US radio and television stations. As discussed here, in 1986 the US Federal Communications Commission forced divestiture after ruling that Televisa had breached those restrictions. SIN was acquired by a junk bond consortium centred on the Hallmark greeting cards group and renamed Univision. Most programming on the new network continued to be provided by Televisa.

The ailing consortium sold Univision in 1992 to a group of US and overseas investors that included Cisneros and Televisa. The latter groups currently provide the imported content; Univision also develops news/current affairs, educational and entertainment content within the US.

In June 2002 Univision announced that it would buy Hispanic Broadcasting, the leading US Spanish-language radio broadcaster (55 stations, including the top Spanish stations in nine of the leading markets) for US$3.5 billion.

Studies

There is currently no major English-language study of the Cisneros family or the group.

We recommend Arlene Dávila's excellent study of Latino media - Latinos, Inc. The Marketing and Making of a People (Berkeley: Uni of California Press 2001). Elizabeth Fox's drier Latin American Broadcasting: From Tango to Soap Opera (Luton: Uni of Luton Press 1997) offers insights about markets and production in Central and Southern America. Fox's Latin Politics, Global Media (Austin: Uni of Texas Press 2002) - co-edited with Silvio Waisbord - is indispensable. There's a similar perspective in Political Clientalism & the Media: Southern Europe & Latin America in Comparative Perspective (PDF) by Daniel Hallin & Stylianos Papathanassopoulos.

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