The first of a few predicted stock photo company mergers for 2015 has been announced by two leading food stock photo libraries – StockFood and PhotoCuisine have signed a global partnership agreement joining forces from March 1st 2015.
According to the deal – PhotoCuisine, based in Paris will exclusively represent the StockFood collection in its domestic market. In addition to PhotoCuisine’s own 215,000 images, the combined offering will provide PhotoCuisine customers in France with access to the entire StockFood collection of over 520,000 images created by 1,100 specialist food photographers.
They say: ‘The agreement between StockFood and PhotoCuisine can be considered a strong message of unity within the highly competitive stock image industry. Both companies are privately owned, remain fully independent and will continue to maintain separate brands and websites. Their partnership will primarily serve to strengthen their business propositions both to the creative contributor community as well as professional food image customers.’
Martin Skultety, General Managing Director of StockFood, is delighted about this alliance: “While having been direct competitors for many years, we have always shared respect for the exceptional work and the high ethical standards of each other. It would seem to require a very long journey to turn former competitors into trustful partners, but in our case it actually wasn’t. There is so much to share and we are looking forward to addressing lots of further opportunities by bringing all our expertise together.”
Pierre Hussenot, director and co-founder of PhotoCuisine along with Pierre Cabannes, is equally delighted about the alliance: “We are extremely pleased about the partnership with StockFood. For many years, our primary focus has been on the French market. Thanks to the StockFood collection, our French clients will now be able to access three times more premium images and videos which is going to be a terrific value for them. Furthermore, this partnership will open the doors of our collection to food customers around the planet. This is great news for us. It’s going to be such a breath of fresh air.”
• StockFood established in Germany in 1979 has 520,000 rights-managed and royalty-free images, videos and features from 1,100 contributors.
• PhotoCuisine established in France in 2000 has 210,000 images by 200 photographers – Under its holding “Sucré Salé” the company is also offering recipe creation, photo and video production as well as iconographic services.
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