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Sony becomes an associate partner of  Team Lagardère

Sony France joins TEAM LAGARDERE as an associate partner for a period of three years

TEAM LAGARDERE was created at the initiative of Arnaud Lagardère to develop a comprehensive programme for promoting the emergence of future champions. Sony’s contribution will ensure that TEAM LAGARDERE has access to high-quality, state-of-the-art electronic equipment (video and computer equipment, flat screens and more).

Active in all sporting fields, TEAM LAGARDERE is an innovative project that will be backed up by state-of-the-art facilities dedicated to sports-related scientific expertise, bringing together top-tier specialists in sports-related research, training and coaching at Paris’ Jean Bouin stadium and the Sophia Antipolis technology park on the French Riviera.

In the words of Philippe Citroën, CEO of Sony France, “This initiative fits perfectly with our strategy of commitment to the world of sport. In our role as technological partner dedicated to optimizing performance, we aim to position value-added Sony products at the very heart of sporting activities. We also wanted to contribute to the advancement of professional and amateur athletes. Sony’s contribution to the TEAM LAGARDERE project illustrates our desire to share the values of innovation and high technology that we hold in common with the Lagardère group.”

“TEAM LAGARDERE is proud to welcome this innovative enterprise as a partner. Sony’s values reflect those of the team, and the company’s products have gained trust and admiration from people throughout the world for their innovation and reliability,” adds Xavier Moreau, Managing Director of TEAM LAGARDERE. “Sony’s involvement in TEAM LAGARDERE’s Associate Partners Club is a perfect example of the win-win philosophy that we would like to expand upon with our partners.”

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About TEAM LAGARDERE’s Associate Partners Club

In addition to the personalized, interactive involvement of each company associated with TEAM LAGARDERE, the team’s Associate Partners Club is setting a new standard for sports partnerships by giving major enterprises an opportunity to merge their interests with those of the partnership and build a powerful, consistent, mutually-beneficial communications programme.

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About Sony

Sony manufactures and designs audio, video and computer products and communications solutions worldwide for consumer and professional markets. With its related activities in the fields of music, photography, video games and e-commerce, Sony is ideally positioned as one of the world’s major consumer brands.

The company generated consolidated annual sales of 53.43 billion euros (7,160 billion yen) for the financial year ending 31 March 2005 and the company has some 151,400 employees throughout the world. In Europe, Sony’s consolidated annual sales totalled 12.03 billion euros (1,613 billion yen) for the financial year ending 31 March 2005, based on the exchange rate in effect during the fiscal period (i.e. 134 yen to the euro). Sony Europe, whose head office is located at the Sony Centre in Berlin’s Potsdamer Platz, is responsible for all of the brand’s European electronics products, and recorded consolidated sales of 8.87 billion euros for the financial year ending on 31 March 2005.

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About Lagardère

A leading French media and high-technology group, Lagardère embodies the successful integration of two complementary spheres: media activities constitute Lagardère’s core, a firm foundation comprising four distinct but complementary operating divisions (book publishing, press media, distribution and audiovisual activities); the group is also a player in the field of high technology via its 15.09% strategic interest in EADS, the leading European aeronautics, defence and space group.

Communications and aeronautics are two fields vital to national sovereignty that engage the responsibility of the Lagardère group, but they also represent two opportunities to express the group’s know-how in a single overarching objective of promoting creativity, performance and continual progress, a goal that TEAM LAGARDERE intends to pursue in the world of sport.

Listed on the premier marché of the Paris stock exchange, the Lagardère group generated revenues of 12,296 million euros in 2004 and has 47,300 employees in more than 40 countries.

The Team Lagardère Web Site