Private | |
Industry | Media group |
Founded | 1878 Copenhagen, Denmark |
Headquarters | Copenhagen, Denmark |
Key people
|
Steffen Kragh, President & CEO Steen Riisgaard, Chairman |
Products | Books, Magazines, Film, Cinemas, Interactive media, Television, PlayStation |
Revenue | €1,551 million (2014) |
€131 million (2014) | |
Total equity | €704 million (2014) |
Number of employees
|
6,300 (2014) |
Website | www |
The Egmont Group (formerly The Gutenberghus Group) is a Danish media corporation founded and rooted in Copenhagen, Denmark. The business area of Egmont has traditionally been magazine publishing but has over the years evolved to comprise mass media generally.
The Egmont Group was founded by Egmont Harald Petersen in 1878 as a one-man printing business, but soon became a magazine business. It was originally called "P. Petersen, Printers", named after Petersen's mother, as he was still too young at the time to register his own company. The company was renamed Gutenberghus in 1914 (after the famous inventor of the printing press), a name it kept until 1992.
Since 1948 Gutenberghus, looking for new opportunities, sent its editor Dan Folke to Walt Disney Productions, and he managed to acquire a license for publishing comic magazines in Scandinavia. In 1948 the company started to publish a Donald Duck comic magazine in Sweden (as Kalle Anka & C:o) and Norway (as Donald Duck & C:o), in 1949 also in Denmark (as Anders And & C:o). This magazine features all the well known Disney Characters, from Mickey Mouse to Little Hiawatha under license from Disney. With the acquisition in 1963 of the Danish publisher Aschehoug, Egmont also entered the book market. From the late 1980s the Egmont Group used the close connection with Disney to expand their Scandinavian focus to a global focus, being the producer of Disney for the new Eastern European market, as well as for the Chinese market. In 1991, Egmont was co-founder of the Norwegian television channel TV 2 which Egmont now owns. The following year, Egmont bought Nordisk Film. In 2008 they acquired the minority stake in magazine publisher Hjemmet Mortensen which they did not already hold, from Orkla ASA.