Gert Verhulst CEO & Founder Studio 100 NV Hans Bourlon CEO & Founder Studio 100 NV Anja van Mensel CEO Studio 100 Benelux Martin Krieger CEO Studio 100 International Steve van den Kerkhof CEO Plopsa
Studio 100 N.V. is a Belgian production company that operates television channels, animation studios and theme parks worldwide. The headquarters of the company is in Schelle, along with offices in Breda, Munich, Paris, New York, Sydney and Los Angeles.
History
Studio 100 was founded in 1996 by Gert Verhulst, Danny Verbiest and Hans Bourlon. The three came together for seven years when they created the show Samson & Gert, in which Verhulst and Verbiest also starred. Samson & Gert started as a duo which announced television shows. Besides the production of their original show they started creating a new series called Kabouter Plop. Following the success of these two shows, the company expanded into new fields in 1999. Studio 100 produced their first movie that year. This movie was called The Gnome Treasure. Besides, the company began to create the musical Assepoester, a Dutch spoken version of Cinderella. They created their first theme park too. For the latter three they required co-funding from the Vlaamse Media Maatschappij. In 2000, they began to expand their offering when they acquired the girl group K3 from BMG.
In 2005, Danny Verbiest announced his retirement from Samson & Gert, but also as a shareholder of the company. The shares were bought by Verhulst and Bourlon, but in a year later, the shares were sold to BNP Paribas Fortis Private Equity. With the new ownership the company ventured into the international, non-Dutch speaking, market by copying their original shows in other languages and creating new shows like Bumba.[1]
Their international expansion took flight in 2008 when they founded a Belgian digital television channel called Studio 100 TV,[2] an animation studio in Paris and Studio 100 Media, a German division to sell their content to the international market. Later that year they acquired EM.Entertainment, a division of EM.Sports Media, for €41 million. EM.Entertainment owned a large library with classics such as Vicky the Viking and Maya the Bee, a television channel called JuniorTV (which closed in 2022) and the Australian Flying Bark Productions.[3] Over the next years, the company revamped the old classics they acquired and established a new cooking channel, called Njam!, in Belgium in 2010 and BeJunior in the Middle East and North Africa in 2016.
The year 2017 was the next big step for the growth of the company when they acquired the US-based animation studio Little Airplane Productions, and their subsidiary Studio 100 Media took a majority share in the Germany-based Made 4 Entertainment (m4e), a company with a wide catalogue with series like Tip the Mouse, Mia and Me and most of the former TV-Loonland AG library. Their share was increased over time until they reached full ownership in 2020, after spinning off some m4e subsidiaries.[4] Their fourth animation studio, called Studio Isar Animation, was founded in 2018 by Studio 100 Media in Munich. In 2020, their animation studio Flying Bark Productions opened a second studio in Los Angeles.[5]
The theme-park division, Plopsa, also grew significantly. After taking full control of Plopsaland in 2005, they opened a couple of new theme parks in Hasselt (2005), Dalen (2010) and co-opened a theme park in Torzym (2018). The division also owned theme parks in Stavelot (2005), Haßloch (2010), Antwerp (2019) and created water parks in De Panne (2015) and Hannuit-Landen (2020). With expansions planned in four countries: Belgium, Poland, Czech Republic and The Netherlands.[6][7]
On 7 February 2020, the ownership of the group shifted again when Vic Swerts and 3D Investors acquired 17% and 8% of the shares respectively. After the transaction Gert Verhulst, Hans Bourlon and BNP Paribas Fortis Private Equity had a remaining 25% share each.[8]
