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BlueFocus Communication Group
Chinese marketing company From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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BlueFocus Communication Group(Chinese: 蓝色光标) is an ad agency engaged in marketing.[2]
BlueFocus was founded by Oscar Zhao on July 1, 1996.[3] It was launched on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange in 2010.[4]
BlueFocus acquired a minority stake in Huntsworth, a London-based PR group, for £36.5 million in April 2013,[3][5] and in December 2013, acquired a majority holding in social media marketing agency We Are Social for $30m.[6][7][8][9]
Since 2014, BlueFocus has engaged in international expansion.[2] It acquired a majority holding in Fuseproject, a U.S. design agency, for $46.7 million in July 2014,[10] which 9 years later was bought back by Yves Béhar, the founder and CEO.[11] It also acquired a majority holding in the North American assets of Canadian advertising company Vision7 International, including Cossette, an ad agency, and Citizen Relation, a PR company, in December 2014 for $210 million.[12]
By 2014, it was listed on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange with a market capitalisation of $3.8 billion,[3] and was ranked as the 17th largest ad agency in the world.[2] As of 2015, its clients included PepsiCo, Lenovo, Volkswagen, and BMW.[13]
BlueFocus established BlueVision in 2016 as the international division of the company that manages BlueFocus's overseas marketing activities.
In 2017, it attempted to merge its international efforts with US-based Fluent, but eventually discontinued the effort over political concerns.[14] In 2019, it advanced into an arrangement whereby its international subsidiaries were partially divested into a separate company Blue Impact, which was to be purchased by a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) Legacy Acquisition led by ex-Procter & Gamble executives Edwin Rigaud and Darryl McCall to publicly list in the United States.[14][15] This arrangement was terminated in July 2020 "in response to the increasing impact on the global advertising sector, and global markets broadly, resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic, which has negatively affected the market valuations."[16]
In 2021, BlueFocus sold a majority stake of its international division to the Québec-based global investment group Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec (CDPQ) and global private equity firm CVC Capital Partners.[17][18][19][20][21][22] Later that year the companies in its international division were grouped under the holding company brand name Plus Company.[23]
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