Egyptian billionaire Naguib Sawiris and Tarak Ben Ammar sell their loss-making Italian DTT multiplex for €2.5 million after bleeding €29 million in 2 years

Naguib Sawiris and Tarak Ben Ammar have sold the digital terrestrial television multiplex operated by their Italian media company Prima TV to a communications engineering firm called Syes for approximately €2.5 million, according to a report by Advanced Television on May 5, exiting a broadcast transmission business that generated cumulative losses of more than €29 million across the 2 years leading up to the sale.

A DTT multiplex is not a television channel. It is transmission infrastructure: a single frequency that carries multiple broadcasters' signals simultaneously to households that receive free-to-air television via aerial. Prima TV's multiplex, branded 3DFree, reached 95.2% of the Italian population, making it one of the widest-coverage private Mux operations in the country. The business model was to lease capacity on that frequency to broadcasters who needed national terrestrial reach without owning their own transmission network.

The sale was approved by Italy's Communications Authority, AgCom. Prima TV first transferred the 3DFree Mux business unit into a newly created entity called Dfree, then sold Dfree to Syes. The total consideration was approximately €2.5 million.

Ben Ammar, the Franco-Tunisian film producer and media executive who is based in Rome, holds 80% of Prima TV and chairs the company. Sawiris, Egypt's richest man and the eldest of the 3 Sawiris brothers, holds the remaining 20% as a minority shareholder. CEO Andrea Goretti has run the company's day-to-day operations.

Why they sold

The Mux business had been losing money for 2 consecutive years and the client base that originally justified the asset had contracted significantly. The most damaging departure was Sky Italia, which terminated its capacity agreement with 3DFree. Losing an anchor client of that scale removed a significant portion of predictable recurring revenue from an already stressed operation.

Prima TV's total revenues fell from €16.6 million in 2023 to €13.1 million in 2024. Even that lower figure was partly artificial: €2.2 million of the 2024 revenue represented a government reimbursement from Italy's Ministry of Economic Development for infrastructure investments made in 2021 and 2022, not commercial income from the Mux operations. Stripping that out, the underlying commercial revenue from selling transmission capacity was closer to €10.9 million in 2024.

Against that revenue base, Prima TV posted a loss of more than €18.5 million in 2024, following an €11 million loss in 2023. The combined 2-year loss exceeded €29.5 million on a business that ultimately sold for €2.5 million. The advertising market for Italian free-to-air television has been under sustained pressure, and the structural shift of audiences toward streaming further weakened the case for maintaining a costly national terrestrial transmission network.

Sawiris exits another media asset

The Prima TV multiplex disposal is consistent with a pattern Sawiris has been following for several years: systematically reducing his exposure to legacy media businesses as he concentrates capital on gold mining, UAE real estate and other investments.

He sold ONTV, the Egyptian satellite news channel, to Ben Ammar's Prima TV in 2012, a deal that also formalised the partnership between the 2 men in the Italian company. He sold Euronews, the pan-European news broadcaster he acquired in 2015, to Alpac Capital in December 2021. The 3DFree Mux disposal is the latest step in that retrenchment from media. Sawiris has indicated in recent interviews that he views gold and property as more reliable stores of value than media assets in the current environment, and his portfolio movements have matched that stated preference.

Who Ben Ammar is

Tarak Ben Ammar, 76, has operated at the intersection of European entertainment, North African media and transatlantic film production for 5 decades. Born in Tunis, he is the maternal nephew of former Italian Prime Minister Bettino Craxi, a connection that gave him deep roots in Italian political and cultural circles from an early age. He has been a longtime collaborator of filmmakers including George Lucas and Steven Spielberg and has distributed some of the most commercially significant films of recent decades through Eagle Pictures, his Italian distribution company.

His media investments span North Africa through Nessma TV, co-owned with Mediaset and the Karoui brothers, and Italy through Prima TV and its remaining assets. The sale of the Mux reduces his direct broadcast transmission exposure in Italy but leaves his broader media and entertainment footprint intact.

Syes, the buyer, is an Italian telecommunications engineering company, the kind of specialised infrastructure operator that can run a national transmission network efficiently without the overhead of a full media business. It acquired a Mux covering 95.2% of the Italian population for €2.5 million. Whether it can rebuild the client base that evaporated under Prima TV's ownership, starting without the Sky Italia contract, will determine whether that price turns out to be a bargain or simply a cheap entry into a difficult market.