• BusinessWeek, Thursday, June 29, 2006 10:45 AM

Grupo Televisa, the Mexican broadcasting giant that just failed to gobble up Univision, has always been "a tough pill" for the U.S. Hispanic media company and its combative CEO Jerry Perenchio, writes Ronald Grover in BusinessWeek. When Perenchio was first fashioning the station group that would become a $1.9 billion multimedia empire, he was said to have physically tussled with Emilo Azcarraga Milmo, then head of Televisa, "over of all things who would pay the bill at a restaurant." He has has battled in court and the boardroom with Azcarraga's son, whose company currently owns 11 percent of Univision. "So it would hardly be surprising if Perenchio's decision to reject a takeover bid from Televisa and sell his company to someone else did not put an end to the fight," Grover says. (On Tuesday, Univision said it would sell itself to a group of private equity firms that includes billionaire dealmaker Haim Saban.) Televisa then issued a statement saying that Univision had "refused to enter into any discussions with us after we submitted our initial bid" and that Televisa "has a number of alternatives that it is considering." Among the possible ones: "It may launch a competing Spanish-language network in the U.S., and it might, just might, make yet another bid for Perenchio's company."

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