19/04/2011
NEWS STORY
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They say there is no such thing as a dead cert but the graph above would suggest otherwise. It comes courtesy of Thomson Reuters LPC - the world's premier provider of data on corporate debt and although this may seem irrelevant to F1, Pitpass' business editor Chris Sylt explains that, in fact, it couldn't be more important.
Over the past few years, the price of the sport's debt has been perhaps the best marker of its likelihood to self-destruct and, as the graph shows, it now looks pretty secure. As regular Pitpass readers will know, F1's owner, finance firm CVC used a £1.8bn ($2.9bn) loan to buy the sport in 2006. F1 paid £36.1m ($59.2m) in interest on this loan last year and the right to repayment of this money has been sold several times. Two banks, RBS and Lehman Brothers, provided the original loan but they quickly sold the right to repayment to get their cash back as the economy nosedived. It initially looked like F1 would struggle to cover its debts and there was good reason for this view.
In March 2009, in the wake of Honda pulling its team out of F1, the debt was selling for 48p in the Pound. This meant that although the debtholders paid nearly £1.8bn ($3bn) for the debt, they were selling it for half that. The theory is that the debtholders were selling for half, even though it meant making a big loss on the deal, because it looked at the time like F1 would struggle to pay back the full amount of the loan over the coming years. It was a case of a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. How times have changed.
Thanks to the data from Thomson Reuters LPC we can see how the price of F1's debt (the yellow and green lines) has accelerated since 2009 which is on the left hand side (axis) of the graph. In contrast the blue line shows the price in general for this kind of debt across many different companies and it is generally well below the price of that for F1. In short, F1 has outperformed the market.
The debtholders realised that F1 didn't implode following Honda's departure and, more to the point, the team's presence doesn't directly affect F1's revenues since it mainly comes from long-term TV rights and circuit contracts. The new teams were announced so even if more manufacturers pulled out, F1 would still have a packed grid. The upshot is that although BMW, Toyota and Renault proceeded to pull out of F1 in 2009, the debt price accelerated.
By late August 2009, when the teams signed the Concorde Agreement to commit to F1 until the end of 2012, the debt price had risen to 84p in the Pound and it didn't stop there. In February this year it hit its highest ever price of 98.4p in the Pound. Effectively, this meant that the financial market believed there was only a 1.6% chance that F1 wouldn't be able to pay its debt back. As Pitpass has recently reported, F1 benefited from lower interest rates during the recession and the debt is due to be cleared by 2014 which is far earlier than CVC initially forecast.
The price of the debt has hovered around 98p since its peak which is more than double its price just two years ago. In the current economic climate there aren't many financial graphs which tick up like the one above and it is of course down to F1's boss Bernie Ecclestone who has somehow steered the sport safely through scandal after scandal. It seems that the only safe bet in F1 is one which is not against Ecclestone.