PARIS—After a year of setbacks, French conglomerate Vivendi SA is nearing a pair of milestones in its effort to pay down towering debt and refashion itself as a smaller—and more handsomely valued—media company.
At a board meeting Monday, Vivendi is expected to discuss plans aimed at extracting more than $3 billion from its cash-rich Activision Blizzard Inc. videogame subsidiary through a special dividend, according to people familiar with the matter. The Vivendi board may push to have the U.S.-based unit approve the dividend at its own board meeting later this week, these people said.
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At Activision Blizzard, one option under consideration is for Vivendi—which controls a majority of the seats on the videogame company's board—to vote for a dividend of more than $3 billion from the subsidiary, some of the people familiar with the matter said.
Given Vivendi's 60% stake in Activision Blizzard, such a dividend would pay Vivendi roughly $2 billion.
Activision Blizzard would have to raise debt of its own to fund such a dividend, because it doesn't have enough cash in the U.S. to pay it, the people familiar with the matter said.
Activision Blizzard had $4.3 billion in cash and cash equivalents at the end of March, but $2.7 billion of that cash is held offshore, and would be subject to U.S. taxes if repatriated, according to company filings.
The proposed dividend isn't a slam dunk. Some people familiar with the matter said the cash payout wasn't the preferred option of Activision Blizzard management, including Chief Executive Bobby Kotick, who has tried to use Activision's cash pile to buy out Vivendi.
But other people close to Vivendi said there was no disagreement on the dividend idea—although no decision has yet been made on whether to pull the trigger.
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