Following the acquisition, IEC will become a wholly-owned subsidiary of Lagardère Sports in order to leverage numerous potential synergies with the Sportfive and Newsweb companies, also owned by Lagardère.
IEC’s sports rights management business principally covers tennis, football, volleyball and athletics. The company markets over 225 sporting events in Europe (a region that represents 75 per cent of IEC's contracts), the USA and Asia, acting primarily as agent but also as rights holder. Drawing on its diverse sports rights portfolio it offers bulk deals encompassing several sporting disciplines, enabling it to provide its clients with a full array of turnkey sport programming solutions.
IEC’s base of 125 clients - of which the 10 largest represent 46 per cent of the company’s sales - mainly comprises television groups from a wide range of geographic regions and which are expected to account for 60 per cent of IEC’s sales for fiscal 2007.
The company has also recently broadened its client base to include new media. It now provides program offerings and other solutions to IPTV operators (such as PCCW in Hong Kong) as well as through broadband services (Betfair in the UK and Setanta in the USA), and HDTV (Indemand in the USA).
