Quebecor Inc. president and CEO Pierre Karl PeladeauOLIVIER JEAN/Reuters
Pierre Karl Péladeau could have stayed on forever as head of Quebecor Inc. His voting shares give him a lock on control of the company. Yet here he is, stepping down after 14 years on the job. Perhaps he had a good hard look at the numbers in that time, and decided he had no choice but to let himself go.
When he took over as chief executive of Quebecor in the spring of 1999, the stock was $34.60. Today it is $45.10. That works out to about 1.8 per cent a year compounded. To be fair, that's better than some rivals over that period (such as BCE Inc.).
But BCE has provided much more in the way of income, cranking up dividends. It now pays shareholders $2.26 per share a year. Quebecor pays 20 cents.
One of the reasons Quebecor struggled to create value for many of those years was the millstone of its transaction to create Quebecor Media. The grim numbers there are detailed in this post from last year. The upshot is overpaying for cable company Videotron Ltee led to a dozen years of very low single digit returns for the media business, weighing down the overall performance at Quebecor Inc.
Mr. Péladeau also spent two years from 2004 to 2006 as head of Quebecor World, the printing business that had been affiliated with the Péladeau family empire.
Two years after his tenure ended there, Quebec World sought creditor protection, wiping out the family's investment in the business. At the time, the Financial Times called it a "severe embarrassment" for Mr. Péladeau.
There's no doubt that Quebecor World was in a tough business, as printing was in decline, but the FT pointed out that "Mr. Péladeau's management style is often blamed for contributing to Quebecor World's troubles. The company has had six chief executives over the past 10 years."
(Boyd Erman is a Globe and Mail Reporter & Streetwise Columnist.)
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