F1赛车商业价值所在

Formula One has a complicated structure and reveals little when it comes to the bottom line. The vast majority of F1 is owned by a private equity firm CVC Capital Partners. Bernie Ecclestone and his family trust still have small holdings.

In the past few years, it’s believed that F1 revenues eased off the accelerator, having lost sponsors, teams and viewers. Christian Sylt has been trying to crunch the numbers for seven years. He figures F1 has an annual net profit around $100-200 million.

“And that’s the actual net profit that I’ve managed to analyze. And that’s after it's made tremendous debt payments. It is owned by a private equity firm and they are paying back an awful lot of the interest repayments on the debt they used to buy the business. So after all of those kinds of payments and all the costs, it’s making about 200 million a year after paying 50% of its profit to the teams.”

F1 is not immune to geo-political problems of course. If the Bahrain race is not rescheduled, money will be lost. There’s also questions how many Japanese fans will buy tickets for their Grand Prix in October. Yet new sponsors have signed up and there is a growing list of circuits as F1 spreads to India and soon the United States. But are the revolving door of teams themselves profitable?

“We are talking of real terms, about a third to half are profitable. But you know they are all getting injections of some sort from, obviously either from the parent company, those teams that really need the money to break even, or from obviously the sponsor.”

Williams became the first F1 team to float on a stock exchange. Its shares have fallen 25% since debuting in early March. But it was fully subscribed and valued the team at around $340 million. Just before the float, I asked the chairman if Williams needed the money.

“I don’t agree with that, because we’ve made profits in 2008, 2009, 2010. We have a fully contracted budget for 2011 and the vast majority of our budget for 2012 as well, so it is not about being desperate for money. We are profitable business.”

For most fans, investors, team owners and sponsors, F1 is about the glamour and fast cars; not to mention the iconic brands, like Lotus, McLaren and of course Ferrari, though few fans can get this close to the cars. So it’s all television. More than half a billion unique viewers are expected to watch the races this season.

Jim Boulden, cnn, London.