The EMI Group, also known as EMI Music or simply EMI, is a British multinational music company headquartered in London, United Kingdom. It was the fourth-largest business group and family of record labels in the recording industry and was one of the "big four" record companies. EMI Group also has a major publishing arm, EMI Music Publishing — also based in London with offices globally. The company was once a constituent of the FTSE 100 Index but since February 2011 it has been wholly owned by Citigroup (which took the then financially troubled company over because of more than $4 billion in debt it held). EMI is a member of the RIAA & IFPI.
In November 2011 Citigroup announced a tentative deal to sell off pieces of the company with the music arm going to Vivendi's Universal Music Group for $1.9 billion and the publishing business going to a Sony/ATV consortium for around $2.2 billion. Other members of the Sony consortium include Blackstone and Abu Dhabi-owned investment fund Mubadala. Both before and after the sale announcement, Universal Music Group pledged to sell off EMI assets to the value of half a billion Euros.
EMI (Electric and Musical Industries) Ltd was formed in March 1931 by the merger of the Columbia Graphophone Company and the Gramophone Company, with its "His Master's Voice" record label, firms that have a history extending back to the origins of recorded sound. The new vertically integrated company produced sound recordings as well as recording and playback equipment.
The company's gramophone manufacturing led to forty years of success with larger-scale electronics and electrical engineering. Alan Blumlein, a skilled engineer employed by EMI, conducted a great deal of pioneering research into stereo sound recording, however many years prior to the perfection of the medium in the early '50s, he was killed in 1942 whilst conducting trials on an experimental H2S radar unit. During and after the Second World War, the EMI Laboratories in Hayes, Hillingdon developed radar equipment and guided missiles, employing analogue computers. The company later became involved in broadcasting equipment, notably providing the first television transmitter to the BBC. It also manufactured broadcast television cameras for British television production companies, mostly the BBC, although the commercial television ITV companies used them as well alongside cameras made by Pye and Marconi. Their most famous piece of broadcast television equipment was the EMI 2001 colour camera, which became the mainstay of both the BBC and several ITVcompanies in the 1970s and early 1980s.
In 1958 the EMIDEC 1100, Britain's first transistorised computer, was developed at Hayes under the leadership of Godfrey Hounsfield. In the early 1970s, Hounsfield developed the first CAT scanner, a device which revolutionised medical imaging. In 1973 EMI was awarded a prestigious Queen's Award for Technological Innovation for what was then called the EMI scanner, and in 1979 Hounsfield won the Nobel Prize for his accomplishment. After brief, but brilliant, success in the medical imaging field, EMI's manufacturing activities were sold off to other companies, notably Thorn (see Thorn EMI). Subsequently development and manufacturing activities were sold off to other companies and work moved to other towns such as Crawley and Wells.
Emihus Electronics, based in Glenrothes, Scotland, was owned 51% by Hughes Aircraft, of California, U.S., and 49% by EMI. It manufactured integrated circuits and, for a short period in the mid-1970s, made hand-held calculators under the Gemini name.
Revrnue £ 1.072 billion (2010)