Groupe Trace

TRACE is a French-headquartered, pan-African pay-TV and digital media group built around afro-urban music. Founded in 2003 by Olivier Laouchez, who remains Chairman and CEO, it has grown into a network of 21 pay TV channels, 30 digital and mobile services and seven FM radio stations, plus a slate of music events, concerts and talent competitions across the continent. Country-specific feeds such as Trace Naija and Trace Mziki carry the group’s Pan-African footprint into individual markets.

Ownership has moved through two private-equity hands. Sweden’s Modern Times Group (MTG) held a majority stake from 2014 until 2018, when it sold that stake to TPG Growth, which bought in alongside co-investors Evolution Media and Satya Capital. Laouchez and TRACE’s management team retained the balance. The group also runs TRACE Mobile, a South African mobile virtual network operator with more than two million subscribers, giving it a direct commercial presence inside an African market rather than just broadcast reach into one.

TRACE’s most consequential recent African dealing is not a broadcast one. In November 2023 it signed an $8.4 million contract with the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s government, split roughly evenly between the two sides, to build two pieces of software: a platform to distribute Congolese music and a second to register musical works and collect copyright royalties for artists. Afrobeats Wire’s own reporting on that contract found that, nearly a year on, the distribution platform had shipped nine months late while the royalty-collection half, the part meant to get Congolese artists paid, had not shipped at all, based on TRACE’s own written account of its delivery record.