Copesa

Copesa or Grupo Copesa (Copesa, S. A.), a Chilean company founded in 1950 by the Picó Cañas family, is one of the holdings of the most important and influential media outlets in Chile. It owns the printed newspapers La Tercera and until 2021, also La Cuarta (which is maintained via the internet). Starting in 2012, it added another multiplatform media, Pulso, which is focused on the business world. Until 2020, he edited the free evening newspaper La Hora, which was distributed free of charge on the Santiago Metro. Outside Santiago, the company shares ownership with Octava Comunicaciones of the University of Concepción, of the Diario de Concepción.

The company has also been a relevant actor within magazines since it edited the political magazine Qué Pasa (until 2018), the market-leading women's magazine Paula (until 2021) and had the license to publish the magazine! Hello! Chile, which expired in May 2018.

In recent years it has been equal to El Mercurio S.A.P., the largest multimedia group in Chile, in terms of products and consumption. In fact, GrupoCopesa concentrates more than 42% of the newspaper market in Chile.^[update] However, Copesa holds a leadership position in digital media with its LaTercera portals. com, LaCuarta.com, Glamorama, Biut.cl, Icarito, Paula.cl, among others. It is also dominant within the supplements market by publishing the magazines Mujer, MásDeco and MT Mag, which circulate alongside La Tercera.

Since the late 1980s, the company's shares were acquired by a group of shareholders including Juan Carlos Latorre Díaz and Álvaro Saieh. The latter has been the largest shareholder since 2000 and shares ownership with businessman Alberto Kassis. Currently the president of the board of directors of Copesa S.A. is Jorge Andrés Saieh and its general manager is Andrés Benítez Pereira.

Copesa's central offices are located at Avenida Apoquindo 4660, Las Condes, Santiago de Chile, and it has offices in different places in the capital.

History

Its first predecessor was the newspaper La Hora, founded in 1935, a pioneer among popular newspapers in Chile. On July 7, 1950, its afternoon edition appeared, La Tercera de la Hora, which in 1951 became a morning edition, displacing La Hora. By the end of the 1950s, La Tercera would become the newspaper with the largest national circulation, a position it would maintain until the beginning of the 1990s.

It was initially owned by the Radical Party until 1948, when it was sold to Germán Picó Cañas (who was Gabriel González Videla's minister) due to the losses suffered by La Hora. For a few more years the company would continue to be linked to radicalism, until in 1965, La Tercera became a politically independent medium.

Between 1968 and 1969 the offices of La Tercera left the center of Santiago, moving to the Ñuble neighborhood, in the commune of Ñuñoa. The linotypes that had been in use since 1935 were also changed to the then new offset system.

In mid-1982, the Picó-Cañas family divested ownership of the company. The new owners quickly give La Tercera a less sensationalist tone. And in the midst of the serious economic situation that the country was going through, it was decided to create a second publication to keep journalists and printers busy. Eventually, La Cuarta, a working class-oriented newspaper that hit the streets on Tuesday, November 13, 1984, and which by the early 1990s was already the most read newspaper in the country, financially supporting the company during a difficult period for the national written press. In order to avoid bankruptcy, in February 1990 it acquired Tercera Editorial Portada Ltda., which published the magazine Qué Pasa. On Monday, November 17, 1997, the evening newspaper La Hora was published for the first time, which would become a free publication in 2000.

In 1993 a group of investors led by Álvaro Saieh began to participate within the company, attempting expansion into a multimedia group with the channel La Red Televisión and the creation of Radio Zero in October 1995. This group finally took over control of the conglomerate in 1999, giving it not only much-needed economic stability but also a new focus looking towards the emerging millennium. In May of that year, Radio Oasis was founded, although it was sold to Julián García-Reyes in June 2000.

With the new century, its digital presence intensified, which had begun in a fairly rudimentary way in 1994. The newspaper La Tercera was also gradually reformulated as a competitor to El Mercurio in the upper segments, abandoning the tabloid format in September 2003. In 2006, the Dial Group was founded after the acquisition of the Duna, Beethoven and Carolina radio stations in 2005. In 2008, La Tercera became part of a multimedia network that included the newly formed CNN Chile.

In 2010 it acquired the rights to print the newspaper Publimetro (owned by Metro International) and the weekly Cambio21 (owned by the progressive foundation/think-tank Chile 21), among other publications that until then were printed in Gráfica Puerto Madero, belonging to the Chilean State. In 2011 he started the publication of Pulso , a newspaper that quickly took a leading position among financial publications.

Between 2016 and 2017 Copesa abandons its building on Avda. Vicuña Mackenna 1870, Nuñoa, after almost five decades, establishing itself in the sector called Sanhattan in Las Condes. During the year the image of a large part of its graphic media was renewed while the radio frequency Paula and Radio Carolina were sold respectively to the Chilean Chamber of Construction and the Bethia Group.

During 2018, after the arrival of Andrés Benítez to Copesa, the newspaper Pulso was closed, merging with La Tercera, which reduced its volume. Paula magazine had a similar fate, which replaced Mujer magazine, while Qué Pasa magazine closed its operations and became a web publication. Copesa decided to expire the license it had with the Spanish magazine ¡Hola!, whose Chilean edition stopped circulating in May 2018.

In January 2020, the newspaper La Hora closes. In 2021, by decision of Andrés Benítez, the newspaper La Tercera decided to reduce its circulation to only weekends for the regions of Valparaíso and Metropolitana de Santiago. In addition, the paper edition of La Cuarta is closed to be an exclusively digital medium and Paula magazine ceases to circulate, after almost 44 years of presence in the media. In March 2021 Copesa sold 50 percent of Diario Concepción to the University of Concepción.

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