Seagram

The Seagram Company Ltd. (which traded as Seagram's) was a Canadian multinational beverage and, during the last five years of its existence, entertainment conglomerate formerly headquartered in Montreal, Quebec. Founded in 1857 as a distiller of Canadian whisky based in Waterloo, Ontario, it was in the 1990s the largest owner of alcoholic beverage brands in the world.

The path to the end of its independent existence started in 1995, when it sold the source of 70% of Seagram's earnings – a 25% holding of chemical company DuPont, a position it had acquired in 1981. Seagram's used the money, plus drew on increased debt positions, to purchase controlling interests in various entertainment and other business ventures, starting in 1995 with its purchase of MCA Inc., whose assets included Universal Pictures and its theme parks.

Unable to maintain financial stability, Seagram sold off assets over the remainder of the decade, until its collapse in 2000: its beverage assets were sold to industry titans Diageo and Pernod Ricard; Universal's television holdings and the studios Interscope Communications, Gramercy Pictures, and October Films were sold to Barry Diller; and finally sold the rest of the Universal entertainment empire to French conglomerate Vivendi.

History

In 1857, Waterloo Distillery was founded in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. Joseph E. Seagram became a partner with George Randall, William Roos, and William Hespeler in 1869, and sole owner in 1883, with the company later incorporated as Joseph E. Seagram & Sons. Many decades later, in 1924, Samuel Bronfman and his brothers founded Distillers Corporation Limited, in Montreal, which enjoyed substantial growth in the 1920s, in part due to Prohibition instituted in the United States in 1919. The Distillers Corporation Limited name was derived from a United Kingdom company called Distillers Company Limited, which controlled the leading brands of whisky in the UK, and which was doing business with the Bronfmans.