Gemma Wright: Investing in sports, entertainment and media

Luke Hyde-Smith (0:02)

Welcome back to the W1M Why Invest podcast with me, Luke Hyde-Smith. And today, we're delighted to be joined by Gemma Wright, partner at CVC and key member of the sports, media and entertainment team at the company.

Prior to joining CVC, Gemma worked for Duke Street, a mid-market, UK-focused private equity firm. Gemma joined CVC in 2013, which is well over 10 years ago, so has had a firsthand view of both the growth of private equity, but also the growth of CVC as a business over that time frame. She currently or has served as NED on some very well-known sports franchises including WTA Ventures, the IPL team, Udret, Titans, Premiership, Rugby and more, which we much look forward to discussing today. So Gemma, great to have you on the podcast. Thank you very much for taking the time.

Gemma Wright (0:53)

Thanks very much for having me, Luke.

Luke Hyde-Smith (0:55)

Well, we really look forward to discussing some of those interesting investments. But perhaps before we kick off, for those listeners who are not aware of CVC, perhaps you could give a quick overview of the business and how it has evolved since you joined.

Gemma Wright (1:08)

Yep, sure. Happy to. So CVC is a global firm with a European angle. We're quite overweight Europe compared to some of our large cap peers. We've been around for 40 years and we're very focused on performance.

Our returns are very consistent and very strong, particularly in private equity during that period. Today, we have about 560 investment professionals. We manage around 212 billion euros of AUM.

We have several investment strategies, so private equity, credit, secondaries, infrastructure.

We call ourselves a global local firm. We have a presence around the world and importantly, we have 30 local offices. And again, that's quite differentiating for us. So we have people on the ground in 30 countries around the world. And that's really important for our origination network. So we have a team in Spain originating locally. We have a team in Eastern Europe. We have teams across Asia. And that network combined with also sector expertise. So we have a number of sector teams, including the sport, media and entertainment team, which I'm part of. Again, that sector plus local combination is quite an advantage to us. In terms of how the firms evolved. So when I joined about 13 years ago now, I joined the UK team, so the UK local team. At the time, we owned Formula One and we previously owned MotoGP.

That was about 28 years ago that we invested in MotoGP. So CVC was always early into sport compared to other institutional investors. And our experience was very positive. And so when I joined the UK team, we made an investment in Skybet, the sports betting platform, a partnership with Sky. And then we made an investment into Rugby and Prem Rugby, one of the companies I sit on the board of, was one of our first sports partnerships after Formula One. And we found that actually sports investing has similarities to other types of sectors, but it also has some differentiators. The governance is different, the value creation plan is different, some of the structuring is different. And so the firm decided that there could be an opportunity to grow our investments in the sport, media and entertainment space by setting up a dedicated team. And so that team was created around seven years ago. I moved across into it with a colleague, and then we've built our investments in sport and entertainment since then. So more in sport. We now have eight sports league investments across football, rugby, volleyball, tennis, equestrian sports. We have one team, as you rightly pointed out, so Gujarat Titans in the IPL, the T20 League in India, very fast growing league. And then we've also moved into other forms of entertainment. We call it other forms of entertainment IP. So these are businesses that own their IP.

It's often content that fans are very passionate about. And so we moved into video gaming with investments in Jagex and Dream Games. And then also live entertainment, SuperStruct. Stage was a business that we owned. We just made an investment in DistroKid, a music platform, and also chess.com over the summer.

Luke Hyde-Smith (4:36)

Okay. Wow. You're a busy team, so we're going to get into some of those investments. But how about your specific role into the industry? Did you sort of always set out that private equity was going to be your career? And did you have a passion for sport or passion for investing in sports?

Gemma Wright (4:53)

Yeah. So on private equity, absolutely not. I had no idea what private equity was when I left university. In fact, I didn't really know what I wanted to do. Therefore, I did actually start in sports. I started as my first job. In the university, commerce was as a sailor. So I did do a couple of years of sailing and then decided. Professional sailing? Yeah, for a couple of years and then decided I should probably earn some money or more money.