Foreword
“Being a good negotiator is a gift”
Christian Van Thillo, Executive Chairman, looks back on 2025 and says goodbye to master negotiator Christophe Convent. “While I was dying a thousand deaths, Christophe remained his quiet, unflappable self.”
Christian Van Thillo
(64), Executive chairman dpg media
Now that Christophe Convent, Secretary-General of DPG Media, is retiring, I can clearly picture how we began: he was 31 and I was 27, and even then we were already two completely different people. Our group did not yet exist and the financial situation was more than worrying. To save ourselves, we had to sell our office building in Brussels and dispose of the weekly magazine Het Rijk der Vrouw/Femmes d’Aujourd’hui to the Dutch company VNU.
I was terrified it would all go wrong. At a difficult point in the negotiations, Christophe, with a perfect poker face, stood his ground. They would sign, he reassured me in a side room. He was right. That was how it would go from then on: I was the nervous entrepreneur, he the calm master negotiator. We were complementary characters – a tandem.
With this first tour de force by Christophe, we laid the financial foundations for what would much later become DPG Media. We built a young, talented team and embarked on a great adventure. We gave the company, or what remained of it after several divestments, a name: De Persgroep (“The Press Group”). With our new team, we spent endless hours brainstorming our vision, ambitions and strategy.
“After some time, our media started to grow and we made a profit for the first time”
People worked incredibly hard, but there was also a huge amount of laughter, and all of us were fiercely ambitious. “We work with the professionalism of a market leader and the spirit of a challenger” – that was our motto. After some time, our media brands began to grow and we made a profit for the first time. That allowed us, in the late 1990s, to increase our stake in television company VTM drastically to 50%. At that point, publisher De Persgroep became a true media company.
From the very beginning until this very day, Christophe has been in charge of everything relating to finance, corporate law and taxation. Whether it concerned the legal structure of the group, complex legal matters, arranging debt financing or managing our relationships with the banks, Christophe oversaw it all – and did so brilliantly every single time.
But what he most enjoyed doing, and what he truly excelled at, was negotiating, usually in relation to acquisitions. While I was dying a thousand deaths, he remained his quiet self at the negotiating table. It has become legendary how he once blocked a merger with De Telegraaf by saying nothing more than the words “not me” throughout an hours-long
session, when the other party assumed everyone was eager to reach a deal.
“We now
have the scale needed to
compete with
the tech giants”
Our long series of acquisitions was negotiated one by one by Christophe. He invariably surrounded himself with CFO Piet Vroman, his closest partner in that process, and a team of outstanding lawyers and bankers. I wasn’t at the table myself: negotiators can read too much from my face. So I sat at home praying that Christophe and Piet would simply sign on the dotted line, whatever it might cost. Occasionally, I would still call the owner. “An expensive phone call,” Christophe would comment, dismissively. And if the other side referred to my words, he would casually say: “Christian is not responsible for that.”
I learnt a great deal from it. First and foremost, that being a good negotiator is a gift, not something you can be taught. But also that bringing complex deals to a successful conclusion is exactly the same as creating successful media or running a strong company: at its core, it’s always about people. You have to surround yourself with the very best. The big difference is that in negotiations you need to be very patient, whereas I’m a great believer in a certain restlessness in entrepreneurship…
With the acquisitions of PCM, Mecom/Wegener and Sanoma, we became the largest publisher of newspapers and magazines in the Netherlands. With the acquisition of Independer, we became a major player in digital services. Last year, RTL Nederland was added to that list. A fitting final achievement for Christophe before his retirement: our biggest acquisition ever.
Over the course of four decades, we have grown from a modest local publishing house into a major media group that invests heavily in the digital transformation of its news media, magazines, radio stations and television channels. We have media brands that play a leading role in journalism and home-grown entertainment.
The most important outcome of all those acquisitions is that we now have the scale needed to compete with the global tech giants. RTL Nederland is one of the very few European television companies to have succeeded in building a streaming service capable of competing with the major international players. Videoland now has more than 1.7 million subscribers and is seeing its advertising revenues grow rapidly. In Flanders, we also have a strong market position with VTM GO and Streamz. But thanks to joining forces with RTL Nederland, we can now be far more ambitious.
Technological developments have turned our sector upside down. Artificial intelligence will once again change the world. Scale is essential if we’re to meet those challenges. A strong media company enables us to provide millions of Dutch and Belgian people with quality journalism, top-class entertainment and home-grown advice.
For one of the architects of this remarkable joining of forces, it is something to look back on with pride, now that the time has come to enjoy other things a little more. The company is grateful to you, Mr Convent.
