Groupe Serveur
The third Millennium industry

  Server Group's listed companies include notably:

 

 

Artprice.com (Sicovam code: 7478)

http://www.artprice.com

Artprice.com, the first dot corp® company to list on the Euronext Paris Nouveau Marché, is majority owned by Server Group (60%). The Bernard Arnault group also has a significant strategic stake (17%) through Agafin and is working to develop industrial synergies with Artprice. A shareholders’ pact registered with the CMF (Financial markets regulator) ties Server Group to Agafin.

Europ@web (part owned by the Bernard Arnault group and Suez Lyonnaise des Eaux) holdings in artprice.com (1 050 000 shares held since the IPO) are brought to Agafin SA, whose chairman is Mr Denis Dalibot and board members are :
- Financière Agache, represented by Mr Pierre Godé,
- Montaigne Participation et Gestion, represented by Mr Bernard Kuhn,
- Groupe Arnault SA, represented by Mr. Nicolas Bazire.
Agafin will abide by the shareholder agreement deposited on 21 january 2000 at the Comité des Marchés Financiers.

Artprice.com is the world’s largest database of art price indices. It has on file the results of more than 4 million sales –3.2 million on-line– covering 290,000 artists from the fourth century to the modern day, drawn from 2,900 auction houses.

In 2001 artprice.com will offer the world’s largest biographical database housing the biographies of more than a million artists.

Artprice.com has bought the main international price-reference works used on the art market, as well as the Swiss company Xylogic (1985) —an IT services specialist in the generation of econometric indices on the art market. It has also recently made a series of strategic acquisitions:

  1. Sound View Press (USA): a grouping of 15 respected reference works on American art, founded in 1975. Publications include Peter Hastings Falk’s classic "Who was Who in American Art".
  2. Caplan Monograms and Signatures (USA), world standard reference work, 1976.
  3. A unique archive of reference works covering the art of the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, including H. Mireur’s seven-volume "Dictionary of Art Sales".
  4. Editions Van Wilder (French publishing house): 12 works of reference on the art market, compiled in 1970.
  5. Argus du Livre de Collection (France), standard global reference work first published in 1982.
  6. The Bayer (USA) data base covering art in the English-speaking world from 1700-1913.

The company expects to make a further ten major acquisitions of European works on art history and data (French, English and German).

Artprice.com is now structured around five departments:

1/ One to collate, input, format and enrich the year’s data. This means all sales at all the world’s fine art auctions, around 450,000 entries annually including no-sales. This department owns a world-unique resource of 270,000 annotated catalogues of fine art auctions.

2/ The specialist department for the XVII, XVIII and XIX centuries. This department compiles data-bases from reference works on antique books and manuscripts relevant to the art market, works such as the Mireur dictionary for the XVII-XIX centuries.

3/ The biographies department, which is compiling and maintaining a centralised database of ancient, modern and contemporary artists, storing detailed biographical information in 120-field records on each artist. It already has 150,000 artists on file and expects this to rise to around 900,000 by end 2001.

4/ The econometrics department produces specific indices for the primary information agencies, the financial press and bank/insurance industries.

5/ The Swiss Xylogic R&D department (Artprice.com Suisse). This is an IT services company producing software for the big auction houses and art professionals since 1985. It is promoting a migration to ASP/world intranet technology as the art market moves towards this standard and so helping increase the transparency of the market.

Every day, artprice.com makes the latest art market trends available world-wide to the major financial agencies and publications and is a valued source of information for prestigious national and international institutions, including the French Senate finance committee (for the committee’s Gaillard Report).

 

Tracing >Server< (Sicovam 7285)

On 15 May 2000, Server Group passed on its subsidiary Serveur Internet SA to Elia, (listed on the Marché Libre. Sicovam code 7285) in exchange for a stake which made it leading shareholder of Elia, renamed Tracing>Server< at its July 2000 AGM.

Le Serveur Internet SA is one of France’s leading professional ISPs, with 3,500 industrial customers, France’s second-ranking dot.com domain name registry. It is 70%-owned by Server Group.

Server Group also owns 20% of Tracing >Server<, and is looking to raise this to above 30%. The alliance brings together the deep internet culture and presence along the whole chain of industrial services and processes (web-hosting and web agency services) of one of France’s longest-established service providers and Elia’s expertise, built up over 10 years in international e-logistics. For the record, Thierry Ehrmann counts as one of the pioneers of e-freight exchanges in 1985 due to his work in deregulating the transport industry.

A shareholders’ pact registered with the CMF (Financial markets regulator) links Server Group to Tracing >Server< 

Tracing >Server< industrial ambition is to develop product tracability: defined as seamless linking of information flows to actual product flows in the market.

  • this industrial development operates as an ASP collecting and compiling tracability information from end-to-end and, at each stage of the process, enriching and collating the information in a universal data base accessible to all.
  • This development reflects strong pressure from European consumers who demand products be fully tracable whether in transit, in consumption or in use.

Tracing>Server< operates in the context of globalising transfers where the cost of formatted information is higher than the cost of transporting the product. "the label costs more than the product". Globalisation forces economic actors to justify their production from an ethical point of view.

Tracing >Server< group backed by its leading shareholder, Server Group, has been listed on the Euronext Paris Nouveau Marché since December 2000.

Server Group is generating substantial industrial synergies between its subsidiaries and Tracing >Server< with strategic acquisitions planned for 2001.

To be continued ... Press release >>>

PRESENTATION
COMPANIES
STAKES
PARIS STOCK EXCHANGE
PRESS RELEASE
Artprice.com: Press Releases

Domaine de la Source I 69270 St-Romain-au-Mont-d'Or I FRANCE I Tel +33 478 220 000 I Fax +33 478 220 606
webmaster @ servergroup.com I S.A.S. capitalized at EUR63,000,000 I RCS Lyon 408 369 270