Times were troubled when Jean-Bernard Levy joined Vivendi, the French media to telecoms giant. A huge acquisition spree had gone wrong and money was tight — so much so that executives wanted to sell the company’s impressive headquarters in the centre of Paris.

Today, as he sits in his top-floor office, which has a rooftop garden and a view of the Arc de Triomphe, Mr Levy explains why he resisted the plan. “Location, location, location”, he realised, was a mantra as important to companies as homeowners. Visitors to the offices would be impressed by a feeling of “the real Paris”.

Mr Levy, who describes himself as “a very young 54”, runs France’s global communications group, which has five divisions producing a turnover of €25.4 billion (£22.7 billion). They include Universal Music, the world’s largest record company, which lists Eminem among its artists, and Maroc Télécom. There is also Activision Blizzard, the games company behind Guitar Hero, Canal+, the French pay-television operator, and SFR, the second-biggest phone company in France, a business that Vodafone would dearly love to own.

It’s a mixed collection that Mr Levy runs with the precision of a portfolio manager, albeit one who prefers to let the group’s companies run their own operations with a relatively light touch. A collection, too, that has its detractors.

“We have been living with this criticism that the company trades at a discount to the sum of its parts, but we think it’s an absurd notion,” Mr Levy says in near-fluent English. “The value of Vivendi is in developing businesses that grow faster than our peer group.” He argues that a large company is a place where businesses can be protected and developed.

After jobs at France Télécom and Oddo, a corporate finance boutique, Mr Levy received the call from Vivendi in 2002 and joined as chief operating officer, rising to become chief executive in 2005. Following his arrival, businesses had to be sold to deal with the debts run up under the Napoleonic stewardship of Jean-Marie Messier. The biggest of the sales was that of Universal Studios, which went to General Electric’s NBC for $3.4 billion in cash and a residual 20 per cent stake.

But those days of crisis, Mr Levy is quick to say, are “way behind us” — the Universal sale was in 2003 — and, “with debt heading for less than €7 billion and free cashflow of €2.5 billion a year”, he believes that he has considerable room for manoeuvre.

“A reduced appetite for risk is not what shareholders want,” he says. He wants to spend money on more of what the company does now. “We don’t expect to diversify into new sectors, with skills we don’t have. We want to focus on the skills we do have.”

What he talks about in broad terms is that he is “periodically looking at emerging markets”, a glib phrase that barely characterises the scale of his ambition — a $10.5 billion (£6.4 billion) bid to buy control of Zain, the African division of a mobile phone group, for example. The bid was abandoned in July after it emerged that even that sum was far below the asking price. Then in September he unveiled a bid for GvT, a €2 billion (£1.8 billion) move on a Brazilian phone company to “meet a strategic objective to expand in fast-growing economies”. However, Telefónica, of Spain, has bid €550 million more and Vivendi has 45 days to put up or shut up.

This relentless interest in telephone companies in the developing world has prompted the expectation that the residual 20 per cent stake in NBC Universal will be sold to cut any debts taken on via an acquisition.

Mr Levy takes pride in the fact that Vivendi has “as little advertising as possible”, about half of 1 per cent of turnover he says, referring to the small amount taken by Canal+. He thinks that his company has had a reasonable recession, with profits in the first half up marginally at €2.37 billion and because games like World of Warcraft “are part of people’s lives”.

Most of Vivendi’s revenue comes from subscriptions — to phone, television or the swords and sorcery computer game. The rest comes from consumer purchases. As for the music, or other computer games, he argues that they are relatively cheap. “We don’t sell anything that costs more than a £50 video game,” he says, although Guitar Hero with its plastic guitar does cost a bit more and “a download on iTunes costs €1, $1 and less than £1”.

However, it is the phone companies that generate two thirds of the underlying profits, although income at both is slightly down and interim profits are off 3.3 per cent at €1.3 billion. Meanwhile, Universal Music, even if it is the market leader, suffered a fall in profits of 18.5 per cent to €211 million, reflecting the position of an industry ravaged by piracy.

“We want to support this business, especially through this troubled period, which we want to see through to the end,” Mr Levy says. He hopes that Universal’s problems can be cured by tough sanctions — he is in favour of disconnecting internet pirates. “Is it disproportionate? No, I don’t think it is, when you consider that people are committing a crime.”

But he adds that he wants to see “a good legal offer” and highlights Vevo, a joint-venture with YouTube that is soon to be launched in the United States, then in Europe. “We’ll supply good-quality videostreams for Vevo — although if they want to download they have to do that via their iPods — and the site will amount to a selfcontained advertising space” — which is another way of saying that he believes advertisers who don’t want to be associated with YouTube’s free-for-all environment will come to Vevo instead. It may work, too.

It is perhaps surprising that the French, with their dire history in pop music, ended up running the world’s biggest music company (the takeover dates back to Mr Messier’s purchase of Seagram at the turn of the decade), but Mr Levy makes no pretence of trying to run Universal — or any of the company’s other divisions — himself. He leaves the task in the case of the record business to Doug Morris in New York, and Lucian Grainge — his annointed successor — in London. His job is to conduct the deals, from his eyrie near the top of the Champs-Élysées. Surprisingly, the curious conglomerate that he controls seems at least to be running harmoniously.

Born: 1955

Education: École Polytechnique; École Nationale Supérieure des Télécommunications

Career: 1978-86: engineer, France Télécom; 1986-88: technical adviser to Gerard Longuet, Minister for Post and Telecoms; 1988-93: general manager, Matra Marconi Space; 1993-94: chief of staff to Mr Longuet, Minister of Industry, Post and Telecoms; 1995-98: chief executive, Matra Communication; 1998-2002: managing partner, Oddo & Cie (investment bank); 2002-05: chief operating officer, Vivendi; 2005-present: chief executive Vivendi

Family: Married, four children