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Faxon on EMI’s “recovery”

By | Published on Thursday 26 August 2010

EMI chief Roger Faxon donned a very fine hat for an interview with Billboard earlier this week to discuss that recent financial report that showed that, while the UK major is still loss-making, it is doing a lot better now than it has for a number of years, despite that horrible multi-billion debt it has with the increasingly unhelpful Citigroup.

Asked for his take on his company’s recent performance, Faxon told the US trade magazine: “There is always the press speculation about the debt load and all of those things. But basically everyone should feel comfortable that EMI is operating on four of its six cylinders, so we have two more cylinders to ignite to get the thing to roll where it ought to be and maybe we will get it up to eight cylinders. But it’s a good solid story. And in any other industry, it would be sort of ‘oh yeah, they are doing okay’ but in our industry, it’s a pretty remarkable turnaround story”.

Asked about why he thought EMI had done a lot better revenues-wise in the last financial year, Faxon focused on projects within the company’s recorded music division, the flagging part of the firm that has only recently fallen under his remit. He mused: “We had a lot of really good records in the marketplace. Obviously, we had the Beatles remastered programme, which was very successful. But we had a lot of other really great success. Lady Antebellum burned up the charts, and while Robbie Williams is largely a European phenomenon, he did really well. You had David Guetta and Lily Allen and a great run with Depeche Mode this past year. So, there were a lot of reasons why EMI Music did well”.

For legal reasons, we must stress that Roger Faxon was not wearing a hat during this interview. The hat mentioned above was figurative.



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