LaCie Acquired 11% of Loewe

LaCie, the French storage and network specialist, has acquired 11.17% of the voting rights of Loewe AG.

The shares were taken over primarily from the British finance investor, EQMC.

LaCie is a consumer electronics company based in Paris offering external HDDs and NAS as well as cloud-based systems for central storage and distribution of video, audio and image files.

In a manner similar to Loewe, LaCie attaches importance to product design and technology.

The publicly-listed company has 450 employees and in 2010 generated €267 million in revenue.

"We welcome LaCie’s investment in Loewe as a proof of confidence in our premium strategy. We are convinced that in the future our new partner will accompany us in the realization of our strategic target to become the leading company in the premium segment of the European consumer electronics industry," commented Oliver Seidl, CEO of Loewe AG.

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Based in Kronach, Germany, Loewe is a very old company in home TV and sound systems, not in storage (but selling some optical disc drives).

It all began in Berlin in 1923, with the brothers Dr. Siegmund and David Ludwig Loewe. The German firm established the first public TV transmission worldwide in 1931, became a leading flat screen television provider in 2005, and ultimately introduced in 2010 the Mediacenter, which provides entertainment networking throughout the home.

Loewe Group sales, mainly from flat screens and in Germany, are regularly decreasing since 2008, reaching €67.4 million in 3Q11 and €186.1 million in the first nine months of 2011, 13% lower than the 2010 figure of €213.9 million.

With 11% LaCie become the second largest shareholder of the German firm behind Sharp with roughly 29%.

The investment of LaCie has not been disclosed. Market capitalization of Loewe is around €42 million.

The idea of LaCie's CEO Philippe Spruch is to marry French storage (LaCie) and Swiss cloud storage (Wuala) with German TV (Loewe).

LaCie also resells screens - high end LCD units - and optical disc drives. We suspect that Loewe could add in the future some LaCie's multimedia storage devices to its portfolio.

Up to now, LaCie was mostly acquiring rather than investing in companies. Formerly Electronique D2, it bought U.S. firm LaCie in 1995, NATI in 1997, APS in 1998 and Wuala (Caleido) in 2009.