BLOOMBERG - NEW YORK Vivendi SA Chief Executive Officer Jean-Bernard Levy is proving it takes an engineer to show that anomalous businesses can be more profitable than complementary ones. While News Corp CEO Rupert Murdoch and Viacom Inc. Chairman Sumner Redstone have been more visible in the media industry, their shareholders have missed stock gains Levy has delivered since joining Vivendi in 2002. The shares have more than doubled from a low of 9.30 euros the week he started. News Corp fell 32 percent in the same period, and Viacom is down 60 percent since it became separate company in 2006.

Levy, a former engineer with France’s telecommunications ministry, kept Vivendi’s phone, pay-television and music units together as Redstone split his media assets. Levy built disparate businesses that rely on subscriptions rather than advertising, helping Vivendi weather the recession better than US publishers and broadcasters including News Corp.

“We can be very successful as a so-called conglomerate,” Levy said in an interview in New York. “At the same time other conglomerates can be very unsuccessful.” In the past 12 months, Vivendi has fallen 19 percent in Paris trading, outperforming a 39 percent drop in France’s CAC40 benchmark index. The plunge in global markets has pushed other media stocks below 2002 levels.

Vivendi rose 12 cents to 19.51 euros on Friday, for a market value of 22.8 billion euros ($31 billion). At its peak in early 2001, Vivendi’s value nudged 90 billion euros. The stock dropped 26 percent last year, ending five consecutive years of gains.

Time Warner Inc, which is spinning off its cable systems, dropped 40 percent in the 12 months through on Thursday. News Corp, owner of the Wall Street Journal, fell 65 percent. CBS Corp, separated from Viacom by Redstone, slumped 81 percent, and Viacom Class B shares tumbled 58 percent.

Representatives for Viacom and News Corp, both based in New York, declined to comment. The companies have been hurt by an industrywide drop in advertising, whereas Vivendi sold publishing assets in 2002 and gets less than 1 percent of revenue from ads.

Vivendi, based in Paris, will raise its dividend this year, after sales and earnings increased last quarter, excluding items such as a 1.5 billion-euro writedown of the value of its 20 percent stake in NBC Universal.

The company, also the parent of the world’s largest video- game maker, anticipates earnings before interest and taxes will advance this year, even as consumer spending drops.

“The decisions that they make are all very logical, finance-driven, as opposed to the little bit of empire-building or impulse toward chasing the latest fads,” said Christopher Marangi, an analyst with Gabelli & Co in Rye, New York. “Levy has been a very good manager and servant to the shareholders.”

Levy says the most inspiring moment of his career occurred within six weeks of joining Vivendi, when he won over skeptical bankers and directors to reject a 6.8 billion euro bid for the mobile-phone unit. That business accounted for more than half of the company’s earnings last year. “It showed how you could resist the tide of everybody that’s telling you that’s what you ought to do,” Levy, who turned 54 on Thursday, said this month. “That was the turning point of Vivendi being a survivor and not being completely dismantled.”

The executive started his career at France Telecom SA, then a state-owned phone monopoly. In 1987, the government decided to open part of the industry to competition, giving telecommunications minister Gerard Longuet three months to complete the task.

Levy, then a 32-year-old technical adviser to the ministry, “pushed everybody, in particular the administration, to get the reform done in time,” Longuet said in a phone interview. “He has an independent streak,” Longuet said. “He doesn’t seek to please just for the sake of pleasing.” Longuet, now a senator, hired Levy again as chief of staff in 1993 when he was industry minister. In August 2002, Longuet slipped a business card recommending Levy under the apartment door of Vivendi’s then-CEO, Jean-Rene Fourtou.

Fourtou, 69, had been brought back from retirement a month earlier to save Vivendi, about to collapse under 19 billion euros of debt accumulated under his predecessor, Jean-Marie Messier. He said he found the card at 11 p.m. after returning dispirited from work. He hired Levy as chief operating officer the next day.

In 2005, Levy succeeded Fourtou, who stayed as chairman. The following year, Levy rejected an attempt to break up Vivendi by Norwegian investor Alexander Vik. Instead, he made acquisitions: a pay-TV business, a musicpublishing group, a French phone company and a controlling stake in the video-game maker now known as Activision Blizzard Inc. The conglomerate nature of Vivendi shaves 10 percent to 20 percent off its stock price, said Alexander Wisch, an analyst at Standard & Poor’s Equity in London.

“We all treat it as a holding company for businesses that have nothing to do with each other,” Wisch said.

Levy is unapologetic about his strategy, saying management style is more important than a “textbook approach.” “‘Conglomerates’ is almost like a rude word,” Levy said. “There is no problem running a media conglomerate. It works well.”

Levy was instrumental in the sale of US entertainment assets to General Electric Co, flying between Paris and the US in 2004 to hammer out details of the agreement that created NBC Universal.

Frequent flights also helped him clinch the $9.8 billion deal with Activision, owner of the “Guitar Hero” franchise. Levy impressed Activision CEO Bobby Kotick over a lunch at the Buffalo Club in Santa Monica, California, in January 2007, according to Kotick. It took 11 months to reach an agreement, after Levy hosted meetings and dinners with top creative talent to ensure they wouldn’t leave. “I couldn’t name a half a dozen CEOs in the US who have accomplished what he’s accomplished,” Kotick, who has run Activision since 1991, said in an interview.

Levy kept Universal Music Group, the world’s largest music company, even as global compact discs sales slumped. Cost cuts helped push the unit’s operating margin — a measure of profitability — to 14.8 percent last year from 12.8 percent.

In August 2002, Standard & Poor’s cut its rating on Vivendi’s long-term debt to BB, two levels into junk status. The rating is now an investment-grade BBB, the same as New York- based Viacom’s and CBS’s. “I enjoy the revenge of the underdog,” Levy said.