25/06/2007
NEWS STORY
Everyone knows that F1's owners, CVC, have a fine track record of making money from their investments but no one has been able to put a precise figure on this. Until today.
An investigation by Christian Sylt and Caroline Reid in the Sunday Express has uncovered the latest accounts for CVC's parent company, Luxembourg-based CVC Capital Partners Group. CVC manages £14 billion of investment funds with its biggest being the £3.7 billion pot that bought the F1 Group in 2005.
The accounts, inspected by accountancy firm Deloitte, show that last year CVC took fees of £65 million ($129m) for managing its funds as well as another £39 million ($78m) of other fees. It made a healthy profit of £38.2 million ($76.3m) on this with one of CVC's biggest overheads being staff costs.
CVC employs just 102 staff but paid out a total of £20 million ($40m), putting the average pay at a whopping £196,000 ($391K) – around three times the average salary of a typical F1 team. But the investors who put their money into CVC's funds make even bigger returns.
CVC's last three funds have given investors returns of up to 42.6% on their money and F1 already seems set to repeat this success.
The 2006 accounts for F1's rightsholding company, Formula One Administration (FOA), are not due until later this year but CVC's own website reveals that the sport had a turnover of £526 million ($1bn) last year.
It isn't clear whether this refers to just FOA or the entire F1 Group with trackside advertising and hospitality revenues included. The website shows that 200 people were employed in 2006 and since FOA had 204 employees in 2005 it could well refer to this company. If so, it would be a staggering improvement in CVC's first year of ownership since FOA had a turnover of £395 million ($789m) in 2005.
Under their new deal, the teams get 50% of the profits from this so they may not have too long to wait before seeing a benefit in their pocket from F1's new owners.