Seagram

About Seagram

Seagram, legally The Seagram Company Ltd., was the Canadian drinks and entertainment group headquartered in Montreal, Quebec. It traced its beginnings to the Waterloo Distillery founded in Waterloo, Ontario in 1857, which Joseph E. Seagram came to own outright in 1883, and to Distillers Corporation Limited, which the Bronfman brothers founded in Montreal in 1924; the two were merged in 1928 and kept the Seagram name.^[1] By the 1990s it owned more alcoholic-drink brands than any other company, Chivas Regal, Crown Royal, Martell and Captain Morgan among them, and it had bought Universal Pictures, Universal Music Group and the Universal theme parks alongside them.^[1] It stopped being independent in December 2000, when the French group Vivendi acquired it.^[2][3]

No company stood above it while it was independent: it was listed and Bronfman-controlled, and it broke up rather than being taken over whole.^[1] It bought the American juice company Tropicana for 1.2 billion US dollars in 1988 and sold Tropicana Products to PepsiCo ten years later, in the same year it bought PolyGram for 10.6 billion dollars.^[1] Vivendi S.A. notified the European Commission on 14 July 2000 of its acquisition of sole control over The Seagram Company Ltd.; the Commission cleared it with undertakings on 13 October 2000, on a structure under which Vivendi and a new holding company were merged into a vehicle to be renamed Vivendi Universal, which would then acquire Seagram and give Seagram's shareholders 29 per cent of the enlarged group.^[2] Vivendi Universal was created on 11 December 2000 out of Vivendi, Groupe Canal+ and Seagram, and shareholders approved changing the name back to Vivendi on 20 April 2006.^[3] The drinks business did not stay with it: Pernod Ricard S.A. and Diageo plc notified a joint bid for the world-wide Seagram Spirits & Wines Group on 20 March 2001, which the Commission cleared on 8 May 2001, the business then belonging to the Vivendi Universal group.^[4] The Seagram name survives on drinks made under licence by others, among them Seagram's Ginger Ale, made by The Coca-Cola Company since 2002, Seagram's Seven Crown from Diageo and Seagram's V.O. from Sazerac.^[1]

Two points this review could not settle. Wikidata records the company as dissolved in 2000, but the Commission's decision of 8 May 2001 still describes The Seagram Company Ltd. as a Canadian company belonging to the Vivendi Universal group, so 2000 is the end of its independence rather than a date of legal dissolution; no Canadian register entry for the company could be reached from here, so dissolved and a register number stay empty.^[5][4] And the sources reachable here date the sale of the spirits and wines business only to its clearance on 8 May 2001, not to the day it closed.