More bright lights this year. Good morning. Welcome, everyone, to Liberty's Annual Investor Day. We are thrilled to have you here, coming to you live from Las Vegas in advance of the third Las Vegas Grand Prix. Thank you to those who have joined us in person and to those who are joining us virtually. Speaking of in person, we are thrilled to have our Chairman, John Malone, here joining us in person. John, thank you for being with us. As we are in the entertainment capital of the world, what better way to start the day with a tantalizing, forward-looking statement? I actually think it is shorter this year than prior years, so there is a gift. Starting with a review of today's agenda, we have presentations from Liberty Media starting right now, with both Derek Chang and Brian Wendling speaking. We will go to Formula One, MotoGP, and Quint.
We will then welcome John to the stage for some Chairman remarks and close the day with Q&A with both John and Derek. After that, we will break for lunch and then have the Formula One Business Summit. Unfortunately, that will not be webcast, but for those who are in the room, we hope you will stay around this afternoon for what promises to be some very exciting content on behalf of the Formula One community. I have to, of course, tout our hashtag that gets very little traction in this audience, but we have one for the Investor Day and the Business Summit, so maybe the Business Summit will be more your style. We encourage you to please tweet something, perhaps. Finally, we thank you for your patience. The slides will be posted. They just will not be posted right away.
Thank you in advance for your patience as we wait to get those on. Finally, I will note a very big thank you to the team that puts this all together, in particular to Amber and Marianne from my team, as well as Alicia, Laura, Robin, and too many names from Liberty to mention. If you see them, please give them a very well-deserved thank you today. It takes a village to put this on, so we appreciate all of their work. With that, let's get to the show.
The Grand Prix is underway.
The round beyond sight takes the lead.
Drive through the city with the speakers up loud.
That is wild in the carpet brakes.
I'm staying driving till the roof ain't in the ground, and I don't wanna stop now.
The turbo car will set you free again.
Music.
With every driver dreams of this moment. It's my time with race team MGP here.
Alex Márquez at least is held down in Chile's first corner.
I want to show this more contact.
Oh, look at him. Álex Márquez is a MotoGP winner.
Pedal down and drive. Drive. Pedal down and drive.
Out of the city, now we're switching border lanes. Got our eyes on a fresh start. The world as we knew it, now it's caught up in flames. Getting ready for the next part. You know I'm good if I'm back in the garden, 'cause this life's here to live for a bath of money. We can drive out of this good and fine. Just take me anywhere.
We're about to go down right here, right now.
Pedal down and drive.
Pedal down and drive.
The crowd on their feet.
Drive.
For the OTE Championship.
Drive.
It's a fresh start.
In OTE.
Drive.
Pedal down and drive.
Good morning and welcome to the 2025 Liberty Media Investor Day, live from Las Vegas. It's great to see everyone, and I am thrilled to be here doing this from Vegas because, in addition to all the great programming we had this morning, which will be highlighted by John and his comments later, along with doing Q&A, in addition to that, we have the F1 Business Summit this afternoon, and then three great days of racing, weather permitting. Excuse me. I'm also thrilled to be here just because this is my first year as CEO of Liberty Media, and really tapping off this year, I want to take you guys through what we've done and where we're going. First, Liberty Live, we announced we were splitting that off, I think, late last year.
We expect that to be effective on December 15th, further highlighting the value of our position in Live Nation. In addition to that, it will make Formula One Group a standalone asset-backed security, which will highlight the values of both Formula One and MotoGP. Our operating businesses continue to perform. We closed MotoGP on July 3rd, and we continue to drive growth at Formula One. From a governance standpoint, some of the changes that have happened over the last year are: one, me becoming CEO. John, I think everyone knows we announced a few weeks ago, will be moving from chairman to chairman emeritus as of January 1st, 2026. Dobb Bennett, who's here, will be moved. Dobb Bennett, who is a longtime Liberty employee and affiliated with Liberty, will be going from vice chairman to chairman as of January 1st.
Finally, most of you guys know Chase Carey, who used to run Formula One. Chase joined our board at the beginning of the year. I've worked with John and Dobb and Chase for, I don't know, close to 30 years, so I'm grateful for their presence as I will continue to lean on them for their support as we move forward. Finally, we talked a lot about structural and corporate simplification, which you can see from this slide we accomplished this year in terms of the Liberty Trip merger, closing that merger, spinning off GCI Liberty, a GCI to create GCI Liberty, and then the Liberty Broadband Charter merger, which will hopefully happen and get accelerated through the Cox transaction, you know, hopefully the middle of next year. Now on to the operating companies. F1 continues to really hit it out of the park.
You know, everything Stefano and his team have done has been really, really incredible this year, highlighted by the F1 movie, which came out this summer, $600 million at the gate, Brad Pitt's highest-grossing movie ever. It solidified our relationship with Apple, which we then turned into a U.S. media rights deal. We are very much looking forward to see what the folks at Apple can do with respect to the content and the product and the promotion that they're going to put behind it. In addition, Stefano and his team have been driving hard, signing up new brands, including Disney, Pepsi, PwC, and Pottery Barn. This year, we are looking forward to the end of the season.
There's still a lot at stake over the next three races, and we're very excited to see what happens, but we're already looking forward to next year where we're going to see Cadillac, Audi, and Ford join the grid. With respect to the Concorde Agreement, which all of you know governs the sport, we are close to signing that with the FIA and with the teams, which will provide stability for the sport for the next five years through the 2030 season. Finally, hopefully many of you will stay and join us for the weekend to watch the races, to watch the race, excuse me. This is our third year in Vegas, and we expect it to be better than ever. We are on track to sell out without having to reduce ticket prices, which is always good.
Really, more importantly, Vegas has become a linchpin, I think, to our U.S. strategy. You see the number of sponsors that have come in: American Express, Disney, Lego. They're all activating in a huge way this weekend. We have music. We have everything. This place, I think you guys walking around will see it's alive. Finally, I just want to say thank you for the entire LVGP team who have been working their tails off this entire year to get to this point that we can have a successful race this weekend. Thank you guys very much. Moving to MotoGP, where we now see ourselves starting with a whole new opportunity to invest and grow. Already we're working on a brand refresh, building global awareness of the sport, investing into the commercial function so we can further monetize.
We've been on track with certain race promoter renewals, as well as signing up new tracks for the future at good increases. Finally, we refinance a balance sheet, which will reduce our interest expense going forward. Today, we believe that Liberty Media is the premier public investment vehicle for global sports IP with exposures to two scarce lead-level properties. We believe we have the best attributes of sports and live entertainment with foundational IP, attractive fan demographics, a global footprint, and what we believe are clear secular tailwinds, which help buttress us against things like AI and trade disputes. We pair that with attractive financial results with durable and diversified revenue streams, capital light and highly free cash flow generative profiles, which we believe will continue to demonstrate strong adjusted EBITDA margins. The power of these businesses is that they're more than just sports properties.
They're global entertainment brands. The success story at F1 is, I think, unparalleled. We believe MotoGP has similar potential. As you see from this flywheel that F1 has created, it starts with building the global brand value while maintaining the heritage of the sport. We then leverage that brand to attract new fans. We now have over 830 million fans, which is up 60% from 2018. Furthermore, to own the fan platform through advanced analytics and data. This then gives us more information that we can bring to partners and sponsors who can then further monetize their brands against our fan base. Opening up new commercial opportunities, which then allows a cycle to repeat.
Looking a little bit more closely at the strong top-line performance at F1, we've built a strong contracted revenue base, which reflects growth in the underlying contracts, new inventory that's been created, things like sprint races and F1 Academy. This has led to existing partners wanting to renew early, therefore demonstrating further the power of the sport. If you look at the bottom of the chart, we believe that we've been operating at levels that are far in excess in terms of growth rates of our peers in the industry. The growth in the F1 business has translated into value creation across the entire ecosystem. We love the fact that we've been able to deliver very good returns, we believe, for our shareholders. At the same time, we know that in order for us to succeed, the entire ecosystem has to succeed.
That means the teams, for instance, which we believe they have succeeded, growing in value at four times since 2017. Valuations of F1 teams are sort of in the neighborhood now of $5 billion-$6 billion, which is comparable to the upper echelons of sports like the NBA and MLB. It is pretty amazing where this has come in a short amount of time. I just saw Toto and Zach yesterday afternoon. They both look very healthy because their teams are healthy. Finally, our promoter partners also have succeeded because of the growth of Formula One. If you go to races now, you see the stands are full. Attendance is pretty much sell-out every place we go. We are reaching record attendance every single year. What this allows the promoter partners to do is to invest behind the business.
They see the demand, they build better facilities, they invest in the fan experience at the track, and again, the cycle continues. Following from the last slide, F1 races command large in-person attendance across these multi-day events. We sell out events and new attendance records as promoters expand their capacity. We are also successfully expanding and diversifying the attendee profile. We are now much more female-skewed than we were before and much younger than we were before. We also realize that not every fan can get to a race. We're only in 24 places, and we have fans around the world. Through digital content, social media, we've found other ways to democratize access to the sport and allow fans to engage. F1 is the fastest-growing sport across social media for the fifth consecutive year. Our social media followers have grown eight times since 2017.
Most importantly, 60% of our fans engage with F1 content daily. That means they're not just watching races or race content. They're watching all the other content that's happening around the F1 ecosystem. We continue to drive much beyond race day in terms of engaging with fans. This is the F1 always-on strategy where we're trying to meet fans where they want to engage, starting with Drive to Survive that broadened our fan base. We then launched new experiential venues, things like F1 Arcade. Excuse me. We've been expanding into consumer licensed product with people like Disney and Lego, again, leveraging off of their own customers to bring new fans into the ecosystem. Finally, I think the Apple movie was a huge highlight this summer of this strategy.
As I said earlier, it grossed over $600 million and no doubt brought new fans into the ecosystem. There is a lot of room left on this track. As you can see from this slide, we have also taken a much more sophisticated view of our fans. Historically, we viewed our fans as sort of a one-size-fits-all. Now we are driving deeper into fan segmentation. We know that we need to develop content and products to meet every consumer, from premium to mainstream, from die-hard gearhead to lifestyle fans. I think this page demonstrates a lot of that. We believe we are uniquely positioned to continue to deliver and serve our fans across the board. Now on to MotoGP, where we think we can take a lot of the learnings from F1 and apply them to MotoGP and grow that business also. We call this a pattern recognition playbook.
If you think about the slide I threw up there earlier, transcending sports into entertainment brands. Again, it starts with building a global brand, reaching more and more fans, owning the fan platform through investing in data and analytics. We believe that this will open up broader commercial opportunities and really grow MotoGP. Finally, the two teams have been fantastic in terms of working together since we closed to share best practices, looking for ways to create synergies on the revenue side as well as on the cost side. Really, what we're trying to do here is pretty simple. We're trying to close the monetization gap between MotoGP and Formula One. As you can see from this chart, Formula One has about twice as many fans as MotoGP.
F1 is clearly outperforming at a much higher multiple across the three major revenue streams, even at 10 times on the sponsorship side. We know we have the skills and we have the learnings from F1, and we can apply that to MotoGP. It's not going to happen overnight. It will take a while. We're not going to close the gap probably completely. Clearly, there's a lot of headroom, and we think this is where true growth is. Finally, to wrap up, I'd like to spend a little bit of time on John's favorite topic, capital allocation. Liberty's hallmark is that we remain opportunistic and flexible while being disciplined about how we allocate our capital. Near term, we've said once we close MotoGP, we would deliver, which is what we're doing.
At the same time, we think the highest potential for investment is within the existing businesses. If Stefano and Carmelo and their teams find opportunities for us to invest behind, we will do that. Third, we do always canvas the market to see what else is out there, what might be relevant to our businesses, what might be relevant to our investment profile. We do recognize that we have simplified our structure. We are now a pure play asset-backed security focused on the motorsports world. We do think that there are potentially opportunities that we can invest behind, and we will continually look for those. At the same time, we are always maintaining an opportunistic view towards capital returns for our shareholders. With that, I want to thank everyone.
I want to thank all of you who have come here in person, those who are listening in. Thank you for your interest in Liberty Media. I'll be back later with John and Shane to do Q&A. Right now, I'd like to turn it over to Brian Wendling. We always leave the most interesting stuff and the most scintillating stuff for Brian to do. Brian Wendling, thank you, guys.
That's a high-pressure lead-in. This is going to be some exciting stuff. Good morning. Thank you for joining us here in Las Vegas. It's good to see everybody. Last year, we announced the split-off of Liberty Live to be completed in the second half of this year. We're going to make it. December 16, we'll start trading as a separate public company.
We're excited about this further simplification step as both Liberty Media and Liberty Live will now be asset-backed securities. We expect to see certain benefits from the split-off, including enhanced liquidity for both securities with exposure to a larger group of investors, the elimination of tracking stock complexity, narrowing trading discounts to net asset value, and enhanced flexibility. There'll be a pre-split-off reattribution to move Quint and the final cash amount over to Liberty Live in exchange for certain assets coming over to Liberty Media. We can see the final composition of that on the next slide. Here, we'll take a quick look at our navs. You can see both are highly simplified at this point from an asset composition standpoint.
Liberty Media will be comprised of Formula One and MotoGP, along with a healthy cash balance, even after accounting for the cash that will be reattributed over to Liberty Live. There's a handful of private investments, with the most material ones being the land and building associated with the Las Vegas Grand Prix and then our investment in the Kroenke Arena Company. The F1 convertibles and debt at the Formula One and MotoGP opcos round out the liabilities here. True to form, there's more information about the F1 convertibles in the appendix. Give those a look. At Liberty Live, you have our 30% ownership interest in Live Nation and the Quint business as our primary assets. You also have a healthy cash balance, which will be bolstered by the $150-$200 million that'll move over to Liberty Live in the reattribution.
There's a few other private assets that will remain on Liberty Live's books following that reattribution. We intend to provide final cash balance and the estimated private asset values at the time the reattribution is completed, but just giving estimates for right now. Lastly, note here, you see the Live Nation collar. In May of this year, we issued a collar against some of our Live Nation shares. This collar was issued to provide a source of liquidity if needed to satisfy any puts or exchanges of the two and three-eighths Live Nation exchangeables because the split-off creates a put window for holders there. To the extent investors do not elect to put or exchange, we do not intend to borrow on that collar. The Formula One Group balance sheet is in great shape. As of 9/30, we have $5.1 billion in debt.
Net leverage at the Formula One business is three times, 5.6 times at MotoGP, and we expect both to deliver quickly. The opco debt, combined with a bit over $600 million of corporate debt, gets you to 3.8 times consolidated net leverage on a trailing 12-month basis. We're still in a strong liquidity position with $1.2 billion in cash on the balance sheet and a little over $600 million of availability between the F1 and MotoGP revolvers. Common theme here near term, the focus will be on delivering post the MotoGP acquisition through adjusted EBITDA growth and free cash flow generation. This slide shows the consolidated leverage at the Formula One Group, including corporate-level debt and cash. As you can see, we have successfully delivered from 3.3 times in 2021 to 0.4 times at the end of last year.
I would note that this 0.4 times is artificially low because of the cash we raised and the F1 equity issuance to fund the MotoGP acquisition. You can see here, the businesses have a proven ability to deliver organically, as illustrated by Formula One being at 7.4 times when we closed the acquisition in 2017, down to 3.0 times. Familiar slide here for most as we look at the five-year average of EBITDA to free cash flow generation. New this year, we have obviously MotoGP being compared to Formula One. F1 continues to have a very strong free cash flow generation profile. MotoGP is very similar at 86% unlevered free cash flow conversion. Cash interest expense is a bit higher at MotoGP given the greater leverage.
As we just mentioned, the recent refinancing activity at Moto will help drive that down along with our deleveraging efforts going forward. Both of these businesses have a very attractive margin structure and low capital intensity. There continues to be a modest uptick in F1 CapEx driven by our Grand Prix Plaza startup costs this year, investments in the media and technical center at Biggin Hill, and investments in other digital and technology platforms. A reminder that the teams share in CapEx investments through the team payment calculation, which allows F1 to make strategic long-term investments. Compared to last year, we continue to see interest expense come down at the F1 opco level, 18% this year versus 20% in the prior year, driven by positive refinancing activity there and reduced debt balances prior to the MotoGP acquisition.
Working capital variability is always going to be driven by really the timing of race promotion fees, that's consistent with the past years. Cash taxes at F1, generally stable as a % of EBITDA, but we expect to see a modest uptick in the cash tax rate as profits increase and the future utilization of certain U.K. tax attributes stays constant. We expect to have a low double-digit cash tax rate at F1 and kind of mid-double digits at MotoGP for the next couple of years. Although MotoGP has a slightly higher tax rate than Formula One, its team payment structure represents a lower percentage of revenue, which drives a higher EBITDA margin starting point. You can see at the bottom of the slide, Vegas CapEx investments have been about a 300 basis point impact on free cash flow conversion over this timeframe.
The financial outlook is very strong at Formula One, with nearly $16 billion of future revenue under contract at the end of the quarter. This is over four times the amount of revenue in the last 12-month period and represents a 14% CAGR since 2022. This is very much a diversified revenue base with a growing number of partners, as evidenced by the logos that Derek just walked you through on one of his slides. Revenue for the trailing 12 months has grown by 6% compared to full year 2024, despite having one fewer race in that current period. This consistent revenue growth has been driven by stable. This consistent revenue growth has driven stable and expanding adjusted EBITDA margins, finishing at 24.3% for the trailing 12-month period.
You can see here that team payments as a % of pre-team share EBITDA have continued to come down, which has fueled investments for continued long-term growth in the top line. While the % has come down, the overall dollar amount of team payments has increased each year as we continue to grow the overall F1 pie, which supports continued health in the overall ecosystem, as Derek pointed out. As a reminder, last year, we finished team payments at 61.5% as a share of pre-team share adjusted EBITDA. We expect to continue to have leverage on that number for the full year 2025. As discussed throughout the year, the new Concorde Agreement will provide for a simpler payout structure beginning in 2026. Going forward and under the new Concorde structure, we expect to generate strong adjusted EBITDA growth and stable margins.
Hopefully, these revenue categories look pretty familiar to you, as MotoGP has a very similar revenue profile to Formula One. Media rights include fees paid by the broadcasters, as well as subscription fees for VideoPass, which is MotoGP's direct-to-consumer product. Items in race promotion and sponsorship revenues are consistent with Formula One. Note that we have reclassed some amounts that were previously in MotoGP's commercial category to be consistent with F1's presentation. As a result, hospitality has moved out of commercial and it's moved into other and is in there with licensing revenue and other championship revenue from other championship series, most notably World Superbike. Primary revenue streams also benefit from multi-year contracts with annual escalators. This revenue mix is comparable to Formula One for race promotion, but lower for sponsorship and other revenue, while media revenue at MotoGP is a higher proportion.
This is similar to the early days of our F1 investment and represents the opportunity we see as MotoGP scales the sponsorship and hospitality side of the business. Looking at the MotoGP cost structure, Moto and F1 have very similar types of expenses, including personnel, freight, broadcast operations, commercial activations, and team payments. Similar to F1, we'd encourage you to look at these categories as a % of total revenue. Moto has a more fixed payment structure to the teams through IRDA with a per-race fee, which is also higher for fly-away events than for European events. This results in a more fixed cost structure compared to Formula One. Cost of motorsport revenue is higher in the last 12 months, primarily due to the higher race count, as you can see here on the chart.
Personnel costs represent about two-thirds of SG&A and have been growing as the company's been building out its commercial functions and investing in the business. In the trailing 12-month period, there's been an uptick in organizational costs as the company invests in commercial activities and then also due to the race count. Looking at adjusted EBITDA, you can see that adjusted EBITDA is down a bit slightly in the trailing 12-month period due to the investment that we discussed here and then also the impact of a bad debt recovery that was very early in 2024 that's kind of impacting the comparability of these results. Lastly, looking at the currency mix of where we sit with MotoGP in the portfolio. The majority of F1's contracts, as most of you are familiar, are in U.S. dollar.
Just a quick refresher that their London-based or U.K.-based SG&A costs are in pounds with a handful of revenue contracts in pounds that help to offset that cost exposure. MotoGP is primarily euro-denominated with nearly all of its revenue and costs in euros. U.S. dollar costs at Moto are mainly comprised of freight and organizational costs. Moto has very limited exposure to currencies outside of the euro and the dollar. You can see at the table down below, the majority of our revenue and operating costs are still in U.S. dollars with pretty good matching of cost to revenue for all three major currencies there. In the August refi of the MotoGP debt, the previous all-euro capital structure that was in place was refinanced with a mix of euro and U.S. dollar term loans and a new multi-currency revolving credit facility.
This combination of euro and U.S. dollar debt is better aligned with Moto's current currency exposure. Be sure to look in the appendix for the slides when they're posted, as Shane pointed out, for additional information. It's always fun to end on a high note with something like currency exposure, so thank you for that. Thanks for joining and thanks for your continued interest in Liberty, and thank you to Shane for your partnership over your very short 11-year tenure here at Liberty Media. It's been a pleasure. We wish you the best. Thank you.
This is Formula One. Formula One is the pinnacle of motorsport. Driving the fastest car in the world. It's impossible to describe it. Cars that are pushed to the absolute limit. F1's my life. F1 is everything. Special as Formula One is racing. The little cars are building up to 200 miles an hour.
All or nothing. Converged down the end. Wow. Formula One is going up so fast, and we attract a younger generation. For sure, the best racing movie of all time. The journey done together to grow to think big, and that's really magic. We're back in the U.S.A. We don't want to be anywhere else. It's great to see that the brand has just expanded. It's amazing that it's blowing up the way that it is. The racing's become so much more competitive. No one knows who's going to win this. It's a high I've never experienced before. Ooh, it's hot. Adrenaline times 100. Here we go again. It's just action, fast pace, tension. It's fire. I've never felt anything like this. What an amazing spectacle. Vegas just proved how big the sport has become. Flash report, cars everywhere. You don't get much bigger than Formula One. That's great. Unbelievable.
Hello everyone. This year, we celebrated the 75th anniversary of F1, and it has proved to be a truly memorable season. The championship battle has delivered the thrilling, unpredictable racing that fans love, driving incredible engagement and strengthening our business fundamentals. This on-track excitement is matched by extraordinary strength in financial performance, with revenue up 9% and the adjusted EBITDA up 15% year to date. When I look at the state of Formula One today, I'm not only proud of the financial and operating success we have achieved, but I am very optimistic about the growth we have ahead. We have evolved our sport from a B2B model with attractive contracted revenue streams, successfully grown this contracted revenue base, and increasingly moved into direct-to-consumer channels that benefit our financial and continuing fan growth.
Our teams are also thriving and in robust financial health, attracting prestigious blue-chip sponsors and demonstrating the unparalleled attractiveness of the F1 ecosystem to global brands. This vision is validated by the entrance or return to F1 in 2026 of a number of major automotive manufacturers. Audi will debut as a full-force team with their own power unit. Honda will be the power unit supplier to Aston Martin. Ford will partner with Red Bull, and Cadillac will join the group. We have welcomed the highest total attendance in Formula One history. Over half of our events have sold out completely, with many setting new attendance records. We currently expect full-season attendance to reach approximately 6.7 million total fans, a new record and nearly a 60% increase from pre-COVID attendance levels. Our multi-platform engagement and reach continue to break records.
We also recognize that the definition of reach means something different in today's sport and entertainment ecosystem when fans are engaging with our content in increasingly diverse ways. You can see here the incredible rise of digital platforms that are relevant to our F1 fans, especially younger audiences. For the season so far, over 1 billion cumulative TV viewers have tuned in for races weekend. Average audience is nearly 70 million, with an additional 25 million estimated to view on digital channels. Our F1 social media following has grown to 111 million, a nearly 20% increase driven by rapid growth on platforms such as YouTube and TikTok, increased engagement from younger fans, and a strong interest in both on- and off-track narratives, including the F1 movie. Last year, I outlined our five strategic pillars. I'm pleased to report significant progress across each pillar with incredible momentum heading into 2026.
First is maximizing value across commercial rights. Formula One growth has and will continue to come from all primary revenue streams. It is important to look at the financial picture altogether as these revenue streams work with one another to grow our entire F1 business. Media rights are benefiting sponsorship. Race promotion is benefiting hospitality. Sponsorship is benefiting licensing and more. Going into more details across each area. On race promotions, 2025 has delivered exceptional events with our 24 race calendar at what we believe remains the current optimal maximum. The scarcity of available slots creates robust competition among prospective hosts, building a solid pipeline and driving meaningful increases upon renewals, with promoters also committing to make improvements to circuit infrastructure and hospitality capacity.
Our recent renewal in Austin includes the building of a new private members' club at the iconic Turn 1, with a portion of it to be used for the Paddock Club. Yet another example of how race promotion and hospitality revenues are closely interconnected. We have 18 races contracted to 2030 or beyond, providing exceptional long-term revenue visibility. We are managing high inbound interest from potential new hosts and seeing increasing demands from existing hosts who are focused on retaining their place on the calendar. On media rights, renewal activity this year has focused on the U.S., together with other markets. We have secured Canada, Brazil, Mexico, and more, and are close to finalizing the remaining markets coming due, including Japan, Latin America, and markets across Asia. The U.S. deal with Apple brings together two global brands with a shared passion for innovation, excellence, and entertainment.
It will enable us to reach a huge audience across the U.S. through Apple TV and Apple's extensive ecosystem. Apple holds also incredible social relevance for our target demographic in the U.S., and we believe these two brands coming together will be able to capitalize on younger, more diverse fans. We also are pleased to offer our fans outstanding value with the full suite of Apple TV content and the ability to add F1 TV Premium at no incremental cost. Importantly, F1 will retain all first-party data from subscribers to F1 TV through the Apple platform. Our team is actively focused on completing next year's renewals, with term either contracted or agreed for all but the smallest market and positive outcome achieved.
We will also continue to invest in improving our F1 TV product offering, with the new Premium tier having been especially well received this year, making up nearly 20% of total subscribers. On sponsorship, our momentum with existing and new names alike is impressive. The full list is shown on the slide here, with the F1 brand's strengths continuing to attract world-class partners on an unprecedented scale. This year, we welcomed the additional luxury brand under our historic 10-year partnership with LVMH. This partnership represents one of the largest sponsorship deals in sport history and reflects F1's position at the intersection of sport, luxury, and global culture. We also recently renewed our long-term partnership with Heineken, accelerating the renewal cycle given our shared appreciation for growing our relationship together.
Last year, we discussed the high degree of visibility in our sponsorship revenue heading into the 2025 season, helping to de-risk this revenue stream and enable a clear focus on quality of partners. I'm proud to report the same dynamic holds today, with high visibility of continued growth in 2026 from our existing partner renewal and a good pipeline of further opportunities. F1 now has 26 global and official partners in the upper tiers of our offering, more than doubling from just 11 such partners back in 2020. These growths reflect our strong brand resonance and the success we have had in expanding our commercial inventory. We have also significantly developed our licensing strategy and have seen new deals with like-minded brands. While still early days in developing this revenue stream, the progress is impressive.
F1's ability to pair its premium IP with that of other Iconia tier rights holders is unique. We will continue to scale the consumer license product area alongside our licensed experiential ventures like F1 Arcade and F1 Exhibition, which bring the thrill of F1 to ever more fans outside of the race weekend. The Paddock Club, our premium hospitality offering, continues to go from strength to strength as we expand capacity strategically and develop new premium experiences to meet surging demand from corporate clients and high net worth individuals. House 44, a collaboration with Lewis Hamilton and Soho House, was successfully launched this year and sold out in Silverstone, Monza, Mexico, Vegas, and Abu Dhabi, with plans to expand to nine races starting in 2026. Our second strategic pillar is augmenting our diverse and valuable fan base.
F1 enjoys the extraordinary advantage of a large, growing, diverse, and commercially attractive fan base. Drive to Survive is an ongoing success, continuing to attract new fans with a cumulative global audience of nearly 1 billion across seven seasons. This year, we celebrate the global release of F1: The Movie, which we believe will provide the tail to our fan growth for years to come. This film represents a cultural moment far beyond traditional sport marketing. Additionally, F1 Academy is helping grow in new female audiences and a growing list of corporate partnerships. We look forward to expanding our pipeline of female talent and supporting this series as it scales. Growing our direct-to-consumer business and deepening fan relationships is an increasing strategic focus.
We are enhancing our fan segmentation capabilities, recognizing that our audience spans from hardcore racing enthusiasts to casual lifestyle-oriented fans drawn to F1's glamour, travel, and entertainment elements. This sophisticated segmentation allows us to position F1 more strategically toward various cohorts, creating both premium and mass-market touchpoints through tailored commercial partnerships. This enhancing side can deliver tremendous value to our B2B partners, helping promoters improve fan experience and data capture capabilities, enabling media rights partners to produce tailored content, and providing sponsorship partners with highly targeted audience alignment activations. Third is investing in strategic markets. We maintain a holistic approach to growing F1 presence in markets with significant fan potential, making coordinated strategic decisions across broadcast partnership, race location, sponsorship, and licensing.
The e-rolls F1 has made in the U.S. and broader North America market is impressive, but we continue to believe our growth in the U.S. has a long runway ahead. Looking at sponsorship as one of examples, when Liberty bought Formula One in 2017, there were no U.S.-based sponsors. Today, eight of our global and official partners are U.S.-based companies, comprising over 20% of 2025 sponsorship revenue, with iconic U.S.-based brands also partnering on licensing deals, as I mentioned. The Grand Prix and the establishment of our business in Las Vegas continue to play a key role in our U.S. growth strategy, driving buzz and fan awareness and generating mass local and global sponsorship interest. Outside of North America, we see opportunity, particularly in under-monetized Asian markets. China now claims over 200 million F1 fans, with over half having started following the sport in the last five years.
The demographic profile is particularly attractive: 46% female and 40% aged 16 to 34. China was the largest international market for the F1 Movie, with over $60 million at the box office. We continue to cultivate strong interest from potential new host cities in Asia and believe our growth will be supported by these prospective new races, locations, and through experiential licensing opportunities that bring F1 closer to the many fans in the region. Fourth is delivering world-class racing. This is a core foundation of our strategy. This season continues the multi-year trend of improved competitiveness. In 2026, we reset the new engine and car regulation. We are already counting down to the season opening in Melbourne. The new technical regulation introduced active aerodynamics, new power units with advanced sustainable fuels, and refined cars dimension aimed at maintaining competitive racing while advancing sustainability.
This is one of the key reasons for Audi, GM, and Ford joining and Honda staying in the sport. Our fifth strategic pillar is prioritizing sustainability in our operation and partnerships. Our sustainability strategy centers on three things: achieving net zero by 2030, promoting diversity and inclusion, and transitioning to the sustainable events that drive positive change. We are on track to achieve our goals, having delivered a 26% reduction in carbon emissions by year-end 2024 compared to 2018. Our promoters' partners have also made great progress in modernizing and reshaping their events' operations to become more sustainable. In the years ahead, our commitment to reaching net zero by 2030 will only intensify. F1 is uniquely placed to show that performance and sustainability can support one another. We approach 2026 with sustained strength, combining regulatory transformation, grid expansion, and high visibility of commercial growth.
Trailing on track, competition is driving unprecedented fans' growth and engagement across every metric. A compelling sustainability vision is becoming an operational reality. Interesting partnerships are coming at a scale we have never seen before and improved financial sustainability is benefiting the league, teams, and partners. In summary, the growth profile ahead is very strong, and we have clear visibility into these drivers over the coming years. We remain excited about what lies ahead, and I want to thank our fans, the FIA, the teams, the partners, and the promoters for their fundamental contribution along this path. Avanti tutta, full speed ahead. Ciao.
Hello everyone. We are very excited to be at our first Liberty Investor Day and share more about our incredible sport with all of you. 2025 has been a very strong year for MotoGP, as we have continued to develop not only our sport but our brand.
We launched our new identity at the end of the fantastic 2024 season, showcasing a new look for MotoGP that reflects the bold, fast, defiant, mature nature of our sport and positioning us well for our next chapter of growth. We expanded on our brand world with our first season launch held in Thailand in February. The event brought the excitement of MotoGP to the heart of Bangkok, with a rider parade through the city streets and ending in an amazing stage show featuring live music and a chance for fans to interact with the riders. The event had a huge impact on our local fan base and beyond, with more than 60 broadcasters across 27 countries airing the launch. We look forward to bringing the excitement of MotoGP to our fans around the world once again with our 2026 season launch in Kuala Lumpur.
Our newly evolved brand positioning, magnetic defiance, will shape how we connect with our fans moving forward. It will carve the stories we share from the world's most exciting sport, helping us build deeper connections while continuing to expand our audience. Similarly, the action on track this season has been great across all the racing classes. Every race weekend hosts both a sprint and a Grand Prix for MotoGP, as well as races in the Moto2 and Moto3 classes. The format brings outstanding value to our global fan base with consistency across each event, as well as constant energy and action for fans at each country, with a program designed to deliver non-stop entertainment. This season in MotoGP has been defiant by an extraordinary story: the incredible comeback of Marc Marquez.
After a dominant start to his career, winning six titles in seven seasons, he went through five long years of setbacks, injuries, and recovery before reclaiming the crown this year. It is one of the greatest comebacks in MotoGP's history, a testament to the resilience, talent, and commitment of our heart. In Moto2, we have seen a record number of different winners, including historic debut victories for Colombia and Brazil. In Moto3, the racing has been thrilling as ever, with podiums decided by only hundredths of a second. The racing on track and our effort to showcase more storytelling aspects of our sport have resulted in higher engagement from our fans. We hosted a record 22 Grand Prix across 18 countries this year, including returning to the Czech Republic and Hungary, and had another year of record attendance with over 3.5 million fans.
This is a significant increase on the 3 million fans we welcomed to the race weekend in 2024. According to Nielsen, our global fan base now stands at an impressive 632 million. We are seeing a strong year-on-year growth, with the U.S. up 38% and the U.K. up 10%. While it's still early in realizing the full potential in this market, we are encouraged that our efforts are making an impact. As we look ahead to next season, we are excited about our opportunities. Another 22-event calendar awaits, perfectly paced for fans around the world. A major highlight will be the return of Brazil to the MotoGP calendar for the first time in two decades, arriving just as a new Brazilian star joins the grid.
Representing nearly half of the South American total population, Brazil is already an important market with a passionate fan base and also one with incredible potential for growth. Finally, we also welcome a new chapter for one of our longest-standing teams, with the Red Bull KTM Tech3 now under the leadership of former Formula One team principal Gunther Steiner. Together, this milestone marks an exciting step forward as we continue to expand MotoGP reach, bring in new global audiences, and unlock greater commercial opportunities for all our stakeholders. Now, I'd like to hand over to Carlos Ezpeleta, who will share more about our business and the key priorities driving the new era of MotoGP.
Good morning, and thank you for joining us. I'd like to welcome everyone to MotoGP, the world's most exciting sport.
Born in 1949, MotoGP is the first Motorsport World Championship, with now 77 seasons of incredible racing, passionate fandom, and global growth. 2025 has marked an important milestone for us, with our biggest season yet, comprising a record 22 Grand Prix up from 20 in 2024 and a first-ever MotoGP season-launched fan event held in downtown Bangkok under our brand-new logo. This year has seen us return to Hungary after 30 years and race again in the Czech Republic after a four-year break. In MotoGP, each event includes all three classes: Moto3, Moto2, and MotoGP. Since 2023, also a sprint race every Saturday, providing nonstop entertainment on track from Friday to Sunday and a clear pathway for MotoGP's future champions. Our main races on Sunday are just 45 minutes, which are well-suited to attract new audiences.
Having all classes and the sprint race every GP builds a valuable product to broadcasters and a consistent format to fans. It also elevates the riders for tomorrow, who become relevant icons at young ages. MotoGP is a sport you can't look away from. One moment can change everything: jaw-dropping action with continuous overtaking, dramatic crashes, and epic plot twists. The nature of the sport captures fans who are drawn in by the racing and its continuous ability to deliver the unexpected. This year, for the first time ever, we've had five different world champions on the grid. The average difference covering the top 10 in qualifying was just 0.7 seconds, and 10 out of the 11 teams were on the podium.
Above anything else, 2025 marked one of the greatest comebacks in all of sport, as we've seen Marc Marquez return to the top after five years plagued by injuries. In that incredible racing, along with our new determination to broadly promote MotoGP, has led to some early success. We welcomed a record 3.6 million fans to our circuits, which led 40% of them to have an all-time attendance high. An aggressive pursuit of new audiences, a recurring theme, started with a brand refresh one year ago and the constitution of a marketing function that is still developing. We have welcomed fans to our weekends with the help of our circuits and our promoters. In social and digital, we've importantly increased engagement and coupled that with a 30% increase in reach.
2025 has been a landmark year for growth of the sport, both in new and existing locations.
We've secured seven key renewals in major markets whilst adding new events that strengthen our global footprint. In March, we will return to Brazil after more than 20 years, a market with huge potential, and it could not be at a better time, as just a couple of days ago, we saw Diogo Pereira become the first Brazilian world champion, clinching the Moto2 title. Looking ahead, 2027 will see us racing in Buenos Aires, a city with a global appeal, as we push to bring MotoGP closer to fans in major cities. We're also very excited to welcome Gunther Steiner into the MotoGP family, as he has led the acquisition of Tech3. Gunther will be taking over the team in 2026, and as a new revenue line, we will now include a swear jar in the paddock.
2026 will be the start of an exciting new racing series, the Harley-Davidson Baggers World Cup, which will see the notorious American brand return to the world stage of racing after their last appearance in 1976. We will welcome the great Harley community at six of our events during the year.
We have a runway to build our commercial business, and the work has already commenced. We are very fortunate to have solid industry support and have used strong competitive interests to expand partnerships in oil, gas, lubricants, and tires. Regarding the latter, we have gone to a single supplier in MotoGP, uniting all three classes with Pirelli. Simultaneously, we are iterating media distribution and fan events to expand our presence in and out of race action.
Earlier this year, as Carmelo mentioned, we held our first season launch in the heart of Bangkok, and we'll do the same in February in Kuala Lumpur. With a strong foundation, we are occupied with shaping the future. Carlos will expand upon how this manifests itself on the sporting side, but here are some key enterprise priorities. While we have much to do, if everything is a priority, nothing is. It starts with continuing to deliver the world's most exciting racing to fans in the best possible fashion. Our envious position, controlling production, allows us to showcase the action in a manner consistent with our brand. From there, we must meet fans, especially younger ones, where they are. Discovery has been obliterated by the fragmentation of media, so we will develop content to match each platform and search out new fans.
Similarly, we will use the world-class sporting product to create a deeper connection with current fans and then augment race weekends with entertainment components to attract new audiences.
We already have a fantastic sport, one which we're hugely proud of, but we always strive for more to make MotoGP even better, even safer, even more entertaining, and even more sustainable. Big changes are coming to MotoGP in 2027 as we reshape technology to deliver more of what fans love: racing and the stories behind it. Smaller engines, reduced aerodynamics, and abandoned dynamic suspensions will have racing safer and more competitive, putting rider talent at the forefront. High-level GPS data will be available from all riders to all teams, improving broadcast features like ghost laps and rider-like comparisons.
Finally, one of the most significant technical milestones of MotoGP: the introduction of a 100% sustainable drop-in fuel developed by each team's fuel partner. This innovation ensures compatibility with existing internal combustion engines while paving the way for global adoption in the future. We are also continuously innovating the technology in our sport and our product, including the continued work on our audio communication project. We are developing pioneering technology specifically for MotoGP, which will go into the riders' helmets and their leathers so they can talk to their teams even when they are off their bikes. This will give fans unprecedented access and deeper connections with their favorite personalities.
To capitalize on exciting evolutions on the racing side, we are building on our brand identity refresh with new positioning called Magnetic Defiance. The brand essence aims to attract fans disaffected by fabricated storylines. The Defiance seeks authenticity coupled with unpredictability.
Our current fan base is predominantly high-income, male, and millennial, and is more likely to be settled with kids. We will deepen our engagement with this existing base and extend the brand to new audiences via content creation aimed at a broad cohort inclusive of kids and families. Turbo Riders is in the development phase as an animated series with licensing and fan extensions. Let's remember that we have 22 races in the year, but we will satiate fans' appetite for MotoGP in 52 weeks. We must use all media levers because, despite having record numbers of fans flowing through our circuits, just half of 1% of MotoGP fans will go to a race next year. Crucially, we have an easily consumed sport, with our longest race around 45 minutes. That leads to mind-blowing avidity, where over 80% of our fans watch 75% of the races.
Another part of our job is educating potential fans, and we'll do that in myriad formats. Here's a quick demonstration of that.
When we think of the greatest comeback stories in sports, names like Tiger Woods, Muhammad Ali, and Peyton Manning come to mind. Now you can add Marc Marquez to that conversation, who this weekend returned from years of crashes and surgeries to reclaim the MotoGP world title. For those new to the sport, MotoGP uses the fastest motorcycles ever built to race on legendary tracks around the world at speeds that make even car racing look tame. You see these bikes actually go faster than F1 cars in straightaways.
In this chart showing how long it takes to reach top speed over time, you can see how closely the red MotoGP line tracks to the black F1 line as they hit top speeds of 360 kilometers per hour, or 227 miles per hour. If you compare that to this blue curve of a humble RAV4, you can get a sense of just how extreme those speeds are. Now, when they go around corners, that's when MotoGP gets really insane. Riders lean their bikes more than 60 degrees, low enough to drag knees and elbows across the track. Then their slick tires that are almost gummy from how hot they are cling to the asphalt like hot glue, letting them carve through bends up to 250 kilometers per hour.
If you compare your tires on your car at home to a sole of a sneaker, a MotoGP tire at peak grip is more like stepping in a pile of warm bubblegum.
I often say tha t we are a true global sport, and we are lucky to bring it all over the world. With more than 115 broadcast partners, in addition to our social and digital efforts I mentioned, we can reach all corners. Riders, local heroes, help us not only open markets but drive viewership. With a Turkish rider and the Brazilian Moto2 champion coming into the premier class, we saw a significant increase in viewership in those markets. A global sport brings a global audience, and we have taken the time to divide the world into different target segments. We will take a different approach depending on the stage of each market's fandom.
For example, Indonesia is our most engaged market, but we have room to grow our numbers of fans significantly. In the U.S., while we are not yet a household name, there is extreme avidity once fans learn about our sport. Due to the physical stress and demand on the riders who compete in MotoGP, we do not anticipate increasing the current 22 race limit in the short term. However, as we mentioned previously, our race promotion business is doing very well, with strong demand from new locations and very positive renewals at existing circuits. Looking ahead, we do expect a shift in race distribution, with more events outside Europe as we grow the sport globally and target key markets. Our goal is to bring new events to strategic locations, closer to major cities, and with a broader entertainment offering.
We've created a dedicated team to work with promoters to enhance event promotion and fan experience across circuits. The global reach of MotoGP, plus the aforementioned industry support, puts us in a position to ramp up key areas of growth. We are busy having expansive dialogues with like-minded brands who will put MotoGP inside their marketing initiatives. I cannot overstate the importance of brand partnerships that are authentic and can market us in new and unique ways. Likewise, we have upgraded our hospitality offering, and that work will continue to make it both a strong, self-sustained business but also a driver of our commercial partnerships. That includes working closely with QuintEvents on the product ladder and innovation. The business and the existing audience have been established on the back of the sporting attributes.
As part of the ongoing effort to introduce ourselves to potential new fans, we will continue to integrate entertainment and cultural elements into our race weekends and marketing efforts. Pre-race activations and emphasizing the natural connection with music and Hollywood will lead us to show up in places we have not been previously and to represent MotoGP in an elevated manner in places we already have been. We're seeing huge interest in investment in MotoGP teams, which has been accelerated by the Liberty Media announcement. Our goal is to help racing teams evolve to become sport franchises and then build their own brands. This new investment interest will support that evolution, with teams improving their positioning, talent, and value, leveraging 11 teams with 11 unique identities. We've created a dedicated team to work alongside the racing teams and riders to accelerate development in marketing and promotional initiatives.
We're pushing for more stories beyond the racing, engaging audiences both current and new, with content outside GP weekends and creating awareness during over 30 weeks of the year we don't race. MotoGP has always strived not only to grow our brand and championship but to drive the growth of the entire sport. Through our efforts, we aim to create accessible racing platforms worldwide, ensuring as many kids as possible can practice the sport, widening the base of the pyramid and setting clear paths to the top. Recently, we announced the new look and feel of the Road to MotoGP, unified under the word Moto and our new brand. Starting at just 10 years old with Moto Mini, there's now a clear and structured progression with equal machinery all the way up to MotoGP.
We hope this work will open the sport globally, creating opportunities for young talent and building the next generation of champions.
MotoGP has a strong legacy, and we are entering a new phase with confidence because we have both a premium and accessible sport with valuable long-term partners. What comes next is to share the sport, make it intertwined with popular culture, and scale it to new audiences. Please come to a race because, despite us rattling on, it is truly an indescribable experience. Thank you all for coming, and unless you guys have more currency questions for Brian, we'll turn it off to turn it over to Quint. Thank you.
Thanks, everybody. Pleasure to be here. Quite inspiring to be following F1 and MotoGP, especially considering the amazing collaboration that we already have with them around our experience business. It's quite an honor.
We're here to talk about our experience business. We've seen continued engagement and growth in the experience economy. The trend around people moving towards buying experiences versus things continues to gain momentum. It's cross-generational, and it's global, and it's affected inside of our business. We see it in three primary categories, really, as we look at it. The first one is really the consumer marketplace, the individual that's just looking to entertain themselves and experience life in a different way. We're also seeing this from brands and corporate clients that are looking to engage with customers, with partners in a very different way.
I think one of the most important things that we're seeing today is the idea that the organizers and leagues are seeing the growing economic impact of what this can truly do for them across their entire ecosystem. From that standpoint, this is where QuintEvents' expertise falls in. Now, with that, we jump into our model. Our model has four key pillars that drive our business. The first one is we are a ticket-plus business. Everything that we do is intended to have a VIP experience or hospitality, transportation, some type of coordination of multiple events to make it easier on the customer and the consumer to have the best experience of their lives. Number two, as we focus on the white label, these fans love F1. They love MotoGP. They love the Kentucky Derby.
They love the NBA, and they love the brands that we represent. We do not interject QuintEvents' brand into that. We just quietly sit in the background and provide the service we need to provide. Next, turnkey. We engage from strategy around hospitality, experiential, the production of those assets, the sales and marketing, and the delivery. Full-service turnkey from top to bottom. We also engage in any one of those components that our organizers might ask us to do. We are capable of doing this from top to bottom. Next, technology-enabled. I believe we have built the best packaging technology on the planet to optimize the number of components, the number of tickets, the number of assets, the incoming leads.
The most important thing that we've done there is we've been able to globalize this so that we can manage currencies, time zones, leads coming in from all over the world, languages. We have to be able to service people where they are, in the language they want, in the currency that they want to spend. The last bit, and very importantly, is we talk about our business being global. The technology has been globalized, but we've also built the footprint. That footprint has allowed us to do several things. First off, we'll just talk about offices. We've got an office opening in Barcelona here shortly, which will give us nine offices in eight countries. We'll execute 70 events this year in 30 different countries. We've got customers from 148 countries in 2025 alone.
60% of our customer base is international outside of the U.S., and it truly positions us for global growth. I always like to have a visual to explain what it is we do and how we grow. As a proxy for our business, I've got the Kentucky Derby here in our first year. What you'll see here is two seating locations, two dining locations, and a hospitality center. Fast forward to our 2026 model. This is what it looks like today: 64 different package levels, 26 dining rooms, five hospitality centers that we're producing on our own, three parties that are externally event and outside of the four walls, 3,000 rooms, 400 transportation vehicles, and 12,000 guests a day over the weekend. There's a lot of room to grow in this business with Churchill Downs.
As we move on and just look at our four key partners and kind of where we are positioned today, F1 experiences, we continue to see growth across all products. We're expanding premium products. You heard Stefano talk quite a bit about House 44 and Garage and the like. Those products are very well positioned for us to continue to sell. Additionally, we see very strong demand going into next year in MotoGP and MotoGP Premier. We saw triple-digit high-end premium hospitality growth this year. We're seeing price elasticity in the area of 30-40%, showing that there's an upside potential to build better and more expensive products that have assets that go along with it that make it valuable. Third, I would just say that we really have a runway set.
Dan talked about a collaboration going into 2026, and I think we're well positioned to have an impact there. As we look at NBA experiences, double-digit program growth this year. The concentration in growth is really around the global games. We're seeing a lot of focus coming from the NBA, so we're operating internationally with them quite a bit. Key new product lines. We're developing new product lines with the NBA event by event by event. The last thing that I'll just mention is the Kentucky Derby, which has been a pillar partner of ours. We continue to see significant upside growth as they continue to build and try to make the venue larger. With a 15-year partnership, we're on solid ground, and we expect to continue to grow that business. In 2025, it's been a fantastic year.
Milestones that we are on pace to deliver: record revenues and profitability, the highest package sales volume we've ever achieved before. We're seeing the strongest annual sales booking, which is an indicator for future years. 2026 is looking very, very strong for us. Areas of business where we will continue to focus. We'll continue to drive that scalable technology that makes us best in class. Barcelona will expand our global footprint this year, brick and mortar. We're seeing margin expansion at the event level, and we're getting to a size of the business where we're starting to see economies of scale. Our partner portfolio is robust. As you look at this, and I'll quickly move to the next slide, you'll also see that there's plenty for us to continue to add.
This year alone, we've added Barrett Jackson, which has returned to the family, ATP, and an exciting new area of business that we're working closely on exclusive track promoter deals, which we signed for this year. As we think about the look forward and the roadmap for 2026 and beyond, our core business has several areas where we'll continue to see growth. There's organic growth, as we've talked about in our existing partnerships. We expect new logos. There are literally dozens of logos out there that we are chasing and looking for the time frame for RFPs and renewals. There's plenty of opportunity for us to grow there. The travel business for us, while robust, has tons of opportunity. 84% of our clients today are traveling 1,000 km or more to attend our events, yet only 25% of them are buying travel packages from us.
There is an opportunity to close the gap, and there is an investment being made there. Oftentimes, the dollar amounts and money they are spending on the travel portion is as big as the package themselves. There are adjacent verticals for plenty of industries in and around what we are doing today that we will look to invest in and acquire. Finally, data and analytics. We see more information as people are searching, trafficking, submitting leads, buying hotels, transportation, and engaging with our team on site that we think that the data and analytics piece can be very, very important to our organizers just so they can better understand their customers as they interact with us. There is an investment being made there. F1 in particular, and I am just going to hit on two here. F1 in particular, they continue to innovate their product, and that benefits us.
We're well positioned to continue to sell that. We've seen our Champions Club, which is a franchise brand that we have built with Formula One, which we will do 34 clubs at 24 races, and we're continuing to expand there. This expanded promoter model really is an unlock around data and analytics for us. A nine-year revenue CAGR of 71%, strong, and we expect growth. As we look at MotoGP Premier, very positive early indicators. There is an absolutely untapped premium hospitality and experience market for us to get into, which we're very excited to work on. We have a proven roadmap. While what we develop and what we build has to be authentic to MotoGP, the roadmap is there. We've already seen 159% revenue CAGR over the last four years, and this for us has not even begun to hit its hockey stick.
There is a lot of opportunity here for us. Best is still ahead for us. This year will be record-breaking performance by all measures, diversified growth across our portfolio, and clear roadmap for 2026 and beyond. We are feeling really good about the business. Thank you.
Thank you, everyone. Without further ado, we're going to turn to John to make some of the next slots. John, appreciate you being here.
Thank you, Shane. Before I get into my grandiose form, I want to thank Shane. We're really going to miss you, Shane. You've done a great job for us. I asked for this little moment because there's some confusion about me, my role, my title, and my intentions. I wrote a book. First of all, it was to tell my story, my personal story, how I got involved, my challenges, so on. Second of all, it was to thank the people who have helped me along the way, the teams that we've had, the fabulous support I've had, the mentors, et cetera. I've been very lucky. There's been a great group of people all the way along. In writing the book, I kind of tried to understand why we were successful, exceptionally so, actually.
Singleton Foundation decided that we were the highest public company return over 50 years. Introspection says, well, why? Were we that good? Probably not. We had one thing consistently that we experienced. We tried to be very efficient in everything we did in terms of capital structure, tax leakage. I got famous for that. Primarily because we had a core investor group that stayed consistent and was willing to look at long-term deferred gratification. As a result, we almost always felt that either our holding company or components of our company, because we did start to diversify, were cheap, undervalued. The public markets did not realize what a great asset we had. They undervalued our free cash flow. As a result, pretty much every year that we had any elbow around at all, we shrunk our equity. Okay?
Why I say that's important is because shrinking your equity if you don't have a core group may be a little bit like kissing your sister. There's really no governor on saying you're no longer cheap, right? A lot of companies will buy back their equity and lose sight of the fact that it gets to a point where it may not actually be cheap in any real confidence sense. I just reflect on in the book, all the transactions we got involved in where we took equity positions in other public companies and encouraged them to shrink their equity because we were the control group and we believed that they were cheap. Whether it was companies like Sirius or DirecTV, when we swapped Rupert out of his equity in DirecTV, we owned 38%.
By the time we spun it off to our shareholders and it was bought by AT&T, we were up to 63%. We did not put any more money in. We believed that it was a better investment for them to shrink their equity as capital return. It was numerously mentioned that I focus on capital return, and I do. I just wanted to point that out, that consistent willingness to shrink your equity when it is cheap, generally speaking, not with leverage, but with the free cash flow of either yours or the entity you invest in and getting them to do it, has been a very consistent theme and has created a lot of economic value over the years, of which I certainly personally have been a beneficiary. I wanted to point that out. With respect to my role, okay?
You know I announced that I was stepping down from chairmanship of two companies at the end of this year, Liberty Media and Liberty Global. Now, this is part of a trend because I've gone from being on boards to being emeritus on a number of the companies that I'm involved with. First of all, I want to say that I am still regarded as the control shareholder of eight public companies. And then I'm deeply involved in a ninth, which turns out to be particularly focused on today because it's Warner Discovery and we're expecting our bids to come in this morning. I went to emeritus role at Warner, chairman emeritus in June. I have to say I've been more deeply involved since then than I ever was before. I'm not a control shareholder anymore. I used to be, but not anymore of Warner Discovery.
I have a very large personal stake in the company. I have been extremely involved, really, from David Ellison expressing his interest in negotiating back in July to today. I got a very nice, just showed it to Derek, a very nice email from Brian Roberts, with a picture of him signing his bid with my pen this morning. He was prominently displaying my book. Yeah, I am deeply involved in a lot of things. When you're the control shareholder, frankly, it does not really matter what they call you. This is something Rupert pointed out to me when he welcomed me to the chairman emeritus club. Because you're deeply involved in the company, the government regards you as an insider, whether you care to be or not. You have essentially all the restrictions of being an insider in terms of trading and disclosure.
Your situation does not change. I have played a lot of roles over the years. By the way, this is my 53rd year as the senior executive or Chairman of Liberty Media and its predecessors. I do have a little bit of gray hair. My roles have changed over the years, and I have played whatever roles seem most appropriate. At this point, with so much involvement, and by the way, I have a lot of diversified interests. I was happy to see pictures of the Kentucky Derby in Lexington. We came in second this year in the Derby with Journalism, but we actually trained the winner, Sovereignty, for Sheikh Mohammed. We trained all of Sheikh Mohammed's horses.
I've got a lot of diversified interests that the principal reason for a guy like me saying, "I don't want to be chairman anymore, let Dobb do it." By the way, Dobb was co-founder of Liberty Media 35 years ago and was actually CEO for an extended period of time, has always been on the board. You won't find a more qualified guy on the planet. We have the dream team now looking after Liberty Media, which is principally now becoming Formula One MotoGP, between Stefano operationally and Derek with his deep experience in television sports. Dobb, who is probably the best and most conservative financier you're going to find, I think he got just a terrific organization with a great future. I don't feel at least a bit nervous about not attending 100% of every board meeting.
In fact, in the role of when you're chairman, by the way, common courtesy means you've got to sit through the whole board meeting, including all the administrative stuff and a whole bunch of operating detail and whether Susie's a good marketing executive and all that kind of stuff, which at this stage of my life, I don't have that much interest in. I am very interested in structure, finance, tax, and M&A, and strategy generally. This gives me the opportunity to be totally an insider, access to everything and everybody, express my opinions whenever I want. I tend to express opinions that increasingly look like a shareholder as opposed to an insider. It's a very flexible posture. I'll point out that, for instance, I was chairman for a while of Live Nation Ticketmaster when the companies merged.
I was promised that Shakira would come to my birthday party, and she didn't show. I got Gladys Knight and one of the Pips. You don't always get what you try for. Just to amplify, my role is to look after the equities that I have. Stepping down from the board actually has one advantage in addition to freeing up some time. That is that I can actually move my control positions up without conflict of being on the board. Somehow or other, somebody thought that a board had a duty to stop somebody from going to hard control. If you're on the board, you're stopping yourself. I find it more flexible. As a result, I actually filed a hard Sky Readino filing to go to hard control personally of Liberty Live once it's spun off.
I'm also moving toward hard control of the Atlanta Braves. The spinoff of a little company that I'm going to talk about in a minute, GCI, out of Liberty Broadband. Because I was already over 50% of the voting control of Liberty Broadband, I end up in hard control of it. It will be, let's say by next summer, the only company that I expect to still be on the board of, public company. I'll be chairman at least until it figures out what its strategy is. I personally believe I can start another Liberty Media with appropriate strategy and capital structure using that as a core vehicle. It got spun off with extraordinarily good tax attributes. Who gets that? Why would you think that? I think a sustainable cash flow generation, relatively modest capital investment requirements to sustain the business.
I think it is appropriate to think of as a vehicle for growth and for recreating something like the original Liberty Media. The benefit, of course, is that the great staff at Liberty Media that has been assembled, the young folks, quite talented, are available to support that enterprise on a contractual basis. I have asked some close friends of mine to be involved. I made the original investment, I believe, in the Alaska communications business in 1989, I believe. Ron Duncan, who's been consistently its CEO since, done a great job. It does a wonderful job for the state of Alaska. It's not like most companies. It doesn't face multiple competitors in every aspect of its business. It's a duopoly, really, in the cellular business and the larger towns. It's a virtual monopoly in terms of the terrestrial broadband business.
It's a little different than what you see under a lot of stress in terms of the average cable company right now or old cable company. That differentiates it. Using my thesis that you can do well by accumulating undervalued assets, sheltering them, sheltering their taxes appropriately, managing their tax liabilities and their use of capital, I think it represents kind of an interesting opportunity for me and for anybody else who chooses to come along. We are doing, we've announced a rights offering where we're going to raise $300 million of new equity. It's not an over-levered business. It's only levered about 2.7 times with pretty good debt. I'm setting it up basically to be able to do deals and grow. I personally am backstopping the $300 million rights offering. We'll see what happens. It's an interesting thing.
Of course, today, Warner Brothers gets its bids. Very interesting topical thing. Generally speaking, the old industry, which I'm still pretty involved in, whether it's Charter indirectly through Broadband or Liberty Global or Living Latin America or Sunrise in Switzerland, or I'm even a shareholder in Comcast, believe it or not. Those businesses are facing a lot of headwinds ever since network neutrality was proclaimed as the policy, which then became essentially the global policy. It would be a little bit for our industry like Walmart being told that they have to build shelves in their stores for their competitor, but they're not allowed to know what's sold on the shelves nor participate in the economics of those sales.
That policy has, and then the transition to streaming has put enormous capital pressure on the industry to keep up with the demand, with the capacity needs to take care of streaming. Simultaneously, we've seen this transition in the broadcast mode. It takes one channel to distribute an NFL game nationally. One channel. Whether it's a streaming channel or a linear channel or an MPEG channel or an IP channel, one channel. When big tech decides to take a live event and convert it to streaming, it takes one channel per household, per viewer, per TV set, basically. For instance, 40 or 50 million channels to accommodate the streaming of an NFL game for which the industry does not get paid.
The industry could traditionally participate in the economics of the broadcast of these things, but does not participate in the economics of the streaming unless it can charge its end consumer for connectivity. In that regard, it's pretty much one size fits all. Whether John McCain's mom wanted to watch sports or not, she had to essentially pay the same as people who were sports fanatics and were consuming enormous amounts of capacity on the network. That capacity pressure combined then with probably cheap financing available when rates were cut to stimulate the economy after the financial crisis led to a lot of speculative investing in the business. People, I know, are going to ask me perhaps, do I see a place for this to go? Obviously, consolidation reduces competition and reduces CapEx, and therefore is one thing that will start to reconcile this.
In Europe, we've seen an appreciation that competitors can work together and be supported by regulators in doing so to reduce wasteful excess competition. Whether it's consolidation or whether it's the creation of commonly owned netcos, where the backbone network, for instance, can be shared by multiple competitors, this is not uncommon in the cellular side where the sharing of towers has been a big capital saver. I always use the expression that when trucking companies exist or discount airlines, they're not asked to build their own airport. They can share. The same thing with truckers. I think enlightened regulators may be able to help and address the excess capital that the current environment is forcing to be spent.
Capital intensity, great example would be Charter when Tom Rutledge announced that their capital intensity would be dropping from roughly 20% of revenue spent on CapEx down to, he believed, 14% or lower over the next couple of years. The stock rallied from roughly $300 to $800. Direct equity response to predicted growing free cash flow. When they started on a program rebuilding their network and building out their low density, their stock went from $800. Today, it's under $200. Not great. Okay. The market is very sensitive to levered free cash flow and the trends thereof and therefore how capital free capital, what do they do with what their levered free cash flow, what are they going to do with it?
Of course, in Charter's case, they had a very consistent program of redeeming their own shares, buybacks, which I think, as I said earlier, is great if you have a core group that wants to continue to own the asset. Unfortunately, the principal shareholders actually wanted to sell into the buyback, which I do not think is very reassuring to institutional investors about whether or not these buybacks are rational. Perhaps in their case, in some cases, going to a dividend structure to demonstrate that not only do you have free cash flow, but you are willing to give it back to your shareholders might be a way to put a floor under the economic values in these companies. I personally believe they are capable of generating large amounts of sustained free cash flow.
Therefore, I think there are opportunities in the consolidation of some of these businesses that have terrible market valuations, even though they're generating meaningful levered free cash flows. I use the simple paradigm that personally, my risk-free return right now is about 4%, which means 25 times capital value is 25 times my risk-free return in government securities. Some of these companies are trading at below five times their levered free cash flow. They seem cheap to me if you believe that you can curtail this defensive CapEx and come to a structure that reduces that. That's really all I really want to say about that. Finally, I just want to say for this organization, for Liberty Media, for Formula One, this is the dream team, guys. You got Chase Carey, you got Stefano, you got Derek, you got Dobb.
It don't get better than this. I think it's just a wonderful, wonderful business being very well run, and I'm very proud of it. That's all I'm going to say.
John said if you spoke, then maybe that would alleviate all the questions. If people, he would cover everything. I said, I doubt that's the case. Just logistically, we have some mic runners in the room. What we're going to do is I'll call on you just if you don't mind waiting for a mic before you ask your question. Just so you know, we're here on stage, but we do have Stefano, we have Carmelo and MotoGP management, other members of management in the audience who can chime in as well. I was going to start in advance, but I think I'm actually going to go right to audience questions. We'll start in the front row here with Katkan if we can. Thank you.
Thanks. Dr. Morrow, Wells Fargo for ISI. John, thank you for being here. I have two questions, both somewhat around M&A. When you think about GCI and the opportunity that you have over there, on one hand, you've been simplifying the portfolio that you had. On the other hand, you've been talking about great opportunity that you see to use GCI to keep goal. I was curious to see if you could reconcile those two things and what opportunities you think are most compelling for GCI specifically and how that may fit into the legacy that you've been completing. The second question, maybe around Formula One, when we think about the growth out of your head and the perpetual generation, it's incredibly compelling.
I think we're trying to figure out on the outside over the next few years, is this lead to more deal-making like MotoGP or how much outside interest does this generate and how do you see the future play out for Formula One?
First of all, my scheme for what do I do with GCI? When markets dump sectors, they're not very discriminatory. Okay? They throw the baby out with the bathwater. Trust me, in this huge world we've got, there are a number of communications businesses that are going to generate a lot of free cash flow for a very long time that are selling very cheap. Okay? The goal is to find those, be selective, own enough of them that when you shrink them, you're just driving up your own economics. Okay? Same model. Shelter their free cash flow because you have extraordinary tax attributes. Use financial engineering where it's appropriate. When we created the spinoff vehicle, GCI Liberty, we did it in the state of Nevada, which has much more flexible charter governance than Delaware.
We set it up with the ability to do tracking stocks, for instance, to do preferreds of anything I can dream up. I might point out the first Liberty Media, when we first created it, was because we did not think we were getting appropriate valuation on miscellaneous assets. We threw them into an entity called Liberty Media. We did a simultaneous incorporation. Within a month or so of its creation, I issued a preferred stock distributed to all Liberty Media shareholders that had a bigger face value than the market cap of the company because I wanted to shift tax bases from common to preferred.
Those people who wanted to recover their tax bases, like me, could sell the preferred, recover the capital, and go forward with an equity that was more levered, but without a risky type of leverage because the preferreds were very soft and very flexible. It was a little financial engineering, but it was very important to effectively, in one transaction, double the value of the common equity, which effectively happened. Financial engineering in some situations is important, and the flexibility to do so is important. That is kind of the way I look at it. I look at opportunities in a space that I'm familiar with. If you can't find them in a space you're familiar with, you look at tangential synergies where your tax attributes, your financial attributes, your timing, you can be purely opportunistic.
I mean, what the hell did we know about satellite radio when Sirius became an opportunity, for instance? Being opportunistic, making sure you got flexibility and currency to be able to take advantage of opportunities when they present themselves. I think timing is a very important thing. I think that's the way I see it as an opportunity because I've got some pretty smart staff members over at LMC. The other thing you have to understand about LMC, they were saying great and have been saying great staff over a number of public companies that LMC had nothing to do with, right? On a contractual basis. As a practical matter, the Liberty staff has been running everything from Sirius to Liberty Broadband and so on. I mean, companies in which they had nothing to do with except me because I was the control shareholder.
They get paid, and the auditors look at the numbers and everything. It is a way to be very more efficient. You can have higher quality folks that you could not afford in a small enterprise, but you can take part of their time, and therefore you can be more creative. That is kind of it. I think I have told Derek from day one that his biggest challenge is what to do with all the cash that he is going to generate. This becomes a very real issue. How do you grow a business like this that is about as perfect a business as you can find? How do you make it bigger? Is there going to be an M&A opportunity? They found MotoGP. They believe some of the same attributes that allow them to do what they have done with F1, right? Apply to MotoGP.
We expect that that's going to be a growth engine, and it will require some investment of some of that free cash flow that F1's generating to deliver a MotoGP profile that has that kind of growth curve and valuation and celebrity and personality, which are very important in these kinds of businesses. The other thing that you can point to is there's just a lot of touch points in a business like F1 that you can improve your performance by incremental investment. Those usually have very high returns. You're always looking at the edge of a little money over here, a little money over there will have a really good result because of all the synergistic relationship that you're creating. You constantly are looking for those synergistic relationships that can have, on the margin, great returns.
Now, the one thing I should mention is if you look at the business strategy, for instance, of Live Nation, which frankly, Michael Rapino has done a fabulous job. I'm a huge fan of Michael's. He has a strategy that is synergistic for him, for his business, in about three different ways. That's the strategy of looking at the world and the underserved nature of many countries and regions in terms of what he supplies, which is concert entertainment. He's out there building or buying venues, which have exceptional financial returns. These are real estate investments with exceptional financial returns because of his ability to fill them up with talent and audiences and sell the tickets and sell the soft drinks. He's essentially built in this incremental growth engine that's global. To some degree, it's out of the reach of US regulators.
If you think about valuations, the kind of real estate asset he has as a spun-off REIT down the road will have wonderful economic capitalization. These businesses are sort of looking bright, management is looking for synergistic opportunities. That is the management team at F1 has that challenge. Now, in the short run, just getting the debt leverage to where they want it, that is going to take a year, I think, maybe a little more. You should ask this question to Derek. I'll turn it over to him because this is really the number one question. You've got a company that is trading at a 30 multiple of EBITDA or 28 multiple of EBITDA. How do you sustain it? How do you grow it? What do you do if you are a cash generator that enhances that instead of undermines it?
Wow. On that point, John, I would point to probably a couple of examples. One is actually right here in Las Vegas, right? I am going to caveat this and say, do not take this as a signal that we are going to go self-promote in other locations. Look, what we built here in Vegas, and I see Renee here. Renee spent several years of her life doing this, is an ecosystem for F1 and for new partners to have come in that probably without Vegas, they would not have done. If you look beyond sort of what happens here on the direct revenues attached to being here in Vegas, I think the sponsors and some of the other partners who have come in, because we have Vegas on the map, we had to do that.
Having the capital and the firepower to do that allowed us to capitalize on that opportunity. I see Stefano's here. Stefano has a great team. They've got some really creative folks thinking of new ways to invest and ultimately drive growth and drive revenue. Stefano also has a great CFO. He's pretty much a hard ass. They're going to have that right balance on making sure that we're disciplined in how we do this. You look at MotoGP, which is frankly almost a clean canvas in some ways. There's the teams at F1, as I showed earlier. Those guys are now well capitalized. I think they're all investing in the sport. At MotoGP, it's a little bit more scattered, whether it's the teams, whether it's the local promoters and what they might need.
I think there are ways to collaborate within the existing ecosystem where we obviously do have capital and the ability to deploy it, where we can hopefully use that to accelerate the growth of the whole ecosystem.
I have to say, Derek got invited to the White House for dinner with MBS the other day. He went, and I was holding my breath to see if he had made any kind of deal. We're all talking about where are the Arabs going to spend all their free cash flow? It's been rumored that the Ellisons have been visiting, that Brian's been visiting. I thought at least Derek would come back with a second race in Saudi Arabia.
I'm moving that to Stefano.
Okay.
I'll build on that note, and maybe Stefano can chime in too. One of the questions we did get in advance, separate from capital deployment, was Formula One has sustained such robust top-line growth. A lot of it lately has been sponsorship-driven. The question is, if you look going forward, can sponsorship pass the baton on to others? How do you think about top-line growers for the Formula One business itself going forward, in addition to Vegas and these other opportunities we've talked about? I don't know if we want to turn to Stefano to comment on that. We can bring a mic over.
Thank you. I appreciate it. I would say that it's for sure one of the things that looking ahead in our strategy for the next year is something that we are in contact with because the demand that we're having is generating a great interest, not only on the sponsorship ice cream, but it's generating things that we do believe could be beneficial for a stronger new revenue line, like, for example, licensing that is getting a new one where we're going to be strong because we are still small if you compare to other businesses. I think it is that the actual situation we are living is really us to make sure that this transition from a traditional B2B business has to be will give us opportunity to go to the knowledge of our customers. We are collecting data.
We need to provide content that is becoming more and more important to be relevant for our future. Relevancy for us is the concept which we will build our strategy. We know that we have to be not against our sport. We have an ecosystem where everyone can choose today depending because we have a global sport. We do not have to forget watching a movie, looking at a concert, or going on an entertainment platform. We have this opportunity to increase our revenue stream in categories where before we were not strong. Now, because we have good foundation in other assets that were very, very important, we can really focus our strategy to bring in something new for us.
I think that if I may say, the small, the good things that are coming to us if we want to do something new, Saudi is very blessed to progress other things together with us. Not only that, we have the privilege of having a lot of relations with the government, and we do not want to be political at all, but because they see the benefit for the country, for the community, developing the business together with Formula One. I think that in terms of social relevancy, this is an aspect that is not trivial. It is very, very important. If I make a network at that point, I think this is really what we want to do if we want to keep growing in the U.S. Social relevancy for us is a key element.
Our dream is you wake up in the morning, there is for sure an Apple, there is for sure an NBA, you're going to be at F1 soon, every day. This is really the things that we as a team and F1 want to keep focusing these things as a target. That is why we do believe that in the future, we have just shared, of course, with our herald the last week in Denver, our progress. We have real facts that are proving that F1 is still in a good mood, and we do not want to see it. We live in a competitive world. We are coming from racing, so we feel the adrenaline of being always under pressure in a constructive way to deliver the result that you and our shareholder wants to see from us. That is our way to look at our future.
Yeah. The other thing that is a good point here is that as we're bringing all these new sponsors in, a lot of these are consumer-focused sponsors. I spoke about this earlier. Stefano spoke about it. Whether it's Disney or Lego, as they develop product and merchandise and all that, and kids who aren't fans of anything necessarily start interacting with that, they come to our sport. I mean, if you think about that for the long term, right? The biggest issue with some of the other sports right now is whether or not they're aging out and what the demographics look like. Our demographics are actually getting younger and broader, which is a great place to be because then that provides you additional leverage and durability of your engagement and your revenue streams down the road.
The payback on some of this stuff we're thinking about, and this is John's point on being able to think long-term, is you can go create these relationships, make these investments, even if the returns don't necessarily come next quarter, but five years from now or ten years from now. John, you can tell your own story about going to Walmart, right?
Yeah. No, I walked into Walmart last Christmas looking for presents for my grandkids, and there was a whole aisle given over to Lego Formula One cars, which I thought, wow, right? And these are kits the kids put together or whatever. So it's become a consumer brand increasingly, and who knows how far that can go. It's got celebrity relationships now. I knew when I got the note that Elon was at the Miami GP with his son on his shoulders and Jeff Bezos was there. We were in the big celebrity. This is what drove basketball crazy, right? It's the celebrity association. Working on how you broaden that out, I think, it just gives you a lot of longevity in terms of people wanting to be associated with the sport, with the brand, with the personalities. We put Brad Pitt back in business, I think, right?
Absolutely.
Incidentally, we had a little inside the family joke here for the last week or so, which is, is HBO going to have the television rights for this drama that's going on right now about the future of Warner Bros? I said, David, who's going to play Zaslav, right? David said, for sure, Tom Cruise, right? I asked him, was I going to be represented in this? They said, yeah, John, you're going to be represented by an AI-generated young Clint Eastwood. I thought, okay, I'm in the big leagues now. I mean, who knows what's going to happen here? This is showbiz, right?
I did want to come back and say, when I talked a little bit about what's happening in the old converged connectivity business, a good example would be what Liberty Global was able to do with Switzerland, where carving out the Swiss business, which is wired and wireless, it's a duopoly for the most part in Switzerland with a government partially owned incumbent called Swisscom. They were able to reach an agreement where they had access to Swisscom's fiber build so that you wouldn't get duplicate network build. That gave us a much more rational capital intensity somewhere around 12%. With that, the free cash flow characteristics looked much more attractive off into the future. We were able to create a Swiss-traded connectivity business, telecom business that's trading somewhere around a seven, seven and a half multiple of EBITDA.
Now, that ain't like it used to be, but it's a hell of a lot better than the 4.4 times that Comcast trades at, right? Yes, if you can reduce capital intensity on a sustained basis, these businesses become very attractive. The margins in the business, which investors usually want to look at, are quite high. It's not unusual for a cable company to be 45% or 50% margins. It is a capital-intensive game, but if the cost of capital can be controlled and the magnitude of capital can be controlled, it can be quite remunerative to own equity in these vehicles. We'll see. Like I say, each market could well be a bit different. In the U.K., the government's encouraging the collapse and purchase of these overbuilders, these fiber overbuilders, which have been very disruptive to the economics of the business.
As that process rolls forward and you end up with back scratches between BT and us on fiber, so we're not overbuilding each other, we're basically sharing, the economics improves quite a bit. Never say never. There is hope. I think these businesses will turn out to be slow-growing utilities over time with rationalized capital structures.
We'll go to Peter Supino if we can in the next one. In the back, right next to you, Trace.
Hi everyone. I'm John, Peter Supino with Wolfe Research, I think. I wanted to ask a question of the intersection of John, your knowledge of network technology and economics. In the last five years, the supply side of residential broadband, I think we can all agree, has deteriorated because of fixed wireless, now around the edges, low-performance satellites, and of course, the fiber expansion. My question is, do you believe that five, ten years from now, this segment of the market led by fixed wireless, which is lower capacity, lower speed, but well-priced and well-bundled with mobility, is going to be a really important segment of the market? Is it always just like DSL, and it will be passed by bandwidth demand over time? Will it become less technologically relevant and capacious? Thank you.
It's kind of almost a race condition. In other words, will capacity requirements to fully enjoy, excuse me, the realm of streamed things like sports, can that be handled by fixed wireless? Can it be hired by low Earth orbit satellites in a competitive way? It's interesting. In the U.S., we have not seen the industry go to flanker brands. Europe, there's flanker brands on both wired and wireless pretty much in every market by every major player. They're trying to accomplish this question of lower-priced, lower features to the consumer. It's been pretty successful in terms of stabilizing the market. I also believe that the legacy linear video programming has put an albatross on the back of the traditional cable distributor whereas video programming is just too expensive for most households.
You have seen a lot of attrition that is really driven almost by the television cost as opposed to the connectivity offering. You have seen a lot of migration in the cable business to YouTube because they have a less expensive video offering, which includes a lot of the linear, but as well as streaming. Charter has tried to replicate that by essentially the top four streamers that also have linear. They have done a bundle where essentially they include the ad-supported streams in with their linear bundle. They have not cut the price, but they have added more service to it. The churn at Charter has dropped quite remarkably in the last quarter.
I'm not here to make a commercial for Charter, but the reality is that I think how they handle the television side of the business is an important ingredient, that it represents something that consumers find to be too expensive relative to the value, and that's why you're seeing so much attrition in the video side of the offering in the video bundle. A lot of people are using that as an opportunity to switch over to a different transport at the same time. If you go from, say, Comcast, Xfinity, full bundle, where you got four TV sets in your house, and you switch over to YouTube for the video and T-Mobile fixed wireless for connectivity, you save a lot of money. It is compounded by the video component right now. I think probably that will get rationalized in terms of that differential over time.
The cable guys are stuck by long-term video contracts, and they're all trying to, as we just saw with the Disney thing with YouTube, they're all trying to rationalize their video packages to get closer to value offered from cost to basically make it a better deal for the consumer. This stickiness, if you want to call it that, it's very interesting. You could scratch your head and say, why did, when AT&T owned Time Warner, why did they try to do CNN Plus as a streaming service? And why couldn't it include CNN? The answer is long-term contracts that create a lack of spontaneity or flexibility in terms of the offerings and how they're priced. A lot of these things are just going to have to work their way out because of the contractual terms.
For instance, when we did the Time Warner deal, when Discovery went together with Time Warner, we assumed that we would launch an HBO stream in Europe quickly. It turned out that a lot of the programming was tied up for extended periods of time and could not be unwound. How do you launch a service if you do not have any content? A lot of this delayed gratification, this most recent growth spurt, let's call it, in HBO streaming is primarily because content is becoming available coming off contract. The biggest would be the contract with Sky in England, Germany, and Italy, including Austria and Switzerland, where we just could not launch a service because Sky had the principal programming tied up. Now it is coming off contract, and you are going to see quite a bit of growth.
A lot of these things that you say, it's common sense, why aren't they doing this? The answer is they can't. They got a contract that says they won't. To uncommit to, say, 5,000 cable distributors where you have exclusivity agreements, right? It's just not doable. You're just going to have to wait the contract out. I think that's been kind of frustrating on the media side, on the content side, that they haven't been able to optimize against the new consumer demands because their content is contractually committed for extended periods of time.
I guess David Joyce here in the third row. Thank you.
David Joyce with Seaport. When thinking of applying the Liberty and Formula One playbook to MotoGP, what should we be expecting in terms of the gains of margin expansion, given the synergies, but also the constraints from the Concorde Agreement?
Can you repeat that? Margins?
For MotoGP, for applying the F1 playbook at MotoGP, how should they think about ongoing margins, growth opportunities, et cetera?
Yeah, look, I think there's an investment phase we've talked about already, not necessarily a stair step, but as we are bringing MotoGP up to speed and trying to take advantage of all the things we did at Formula One, requires some investment. We talked about sort of the commercial team and elements of that. In the near term, I think you'll see that. Given the nature of our deals with the teams and the structure of that, as we continue to drive further revenue growth, the hope would be that we do see that margin expansion.
You've seen quite a bit of interest in investment in teams in MotoGP since we announced the deal, right?
Yeah, very much so, which I think, I mean, a whole nother point, but we talked about Liberty bringing that interest, our involvement in MotoGP bringing interest from other strategics or other financial guys who want to come into the sport, which will only help because just like on the F1 side where you see the teams like McLaren and Ferrari and Mercedes really investing into it and promoting and marketing and all that sort of stuff, they're on their own sort of trying to bring in their own sponsors, but it does help the sport. I think we're going to see similar activity on the MotoGP side, which will, again, accrue benefit to the entire MotoGP ecosystem.
Particularly if we can bring celebrity into ownership of teams.
John's hot on the celebrity thing.
Yeah, well, that's what it is. I think that's what Chase Carey told me about it. He said, "This is really celebrity.
That's why we bring Chase back to races because Chase is a celebrity.
Marc Robuchon in the back, I see you there.
Mark Robuchon, currently unemployed, but getting there. John, if you could bear to step off the stage literally and figuratively. You talked a lot about gratitude in the book, and I just wonder from 1973 the way investors have lined up behind you all the way to today, if you would like to just share your thoughts on the gratitude you have.
Yeah, no, it's been a wonderful, what is it, a wonderful life? If you read my book, you see that I was kind of an autistic kid, and I've just been so fortunate. I mean, A, my wife has just been incredible. She would tell you that it took her 67 years to train me to be this social. Just these wonderful relationships. Bob Magnus, who was a virtual father to me, even when I was a salesman at Gerald, when I was selling hardware and turnkey construction and cable, I would go stay at Bob's house. How many salesmen get that? Gene Schneider, oh my God, he couldn't even drink brandy.
I mean, it was like, just the whole history of how good capitalism is, how good people generally are, what a wonderful country America is, how take somebody like Mike Milken and what he did to encourage entrepreneurship and growth in non-investment-grade businesses was incredible. A lot of these things that the relationships, Rupert Murdoch, what can I say? The guy is incredible. He's tough as nails. If he tells you he's going to do something, he'll do it. These are Barry Diller, the most creative guy I've ever been around. I mean, what guy can go turn around two movie studios and build a broadcast network for Rupert and then go on and build a company for us and convert from media into internet access? He keeps going. I think he's taken over Las Vegas right now with MGM.
I mean, personalities, Ted Turner, it's been a wonderful life. I have to say, my experiences have all been, even Sonny Redstone was, he sued me for $3 billion personally to get us to back out of the fight for Paramount, the original fight for Paramount, which, by the way, created the CVR, which we may see come back into existence in this current. It would be very interesting because it would be CVR revisited. Even Sonny Redstone, I ended up buying all of his cable businesses for TCI. I think toward the end of his life, I was probably the only guy that would go have dinner with him. It's just been a great life, has been a great experience for me. I just wanted to relate that in the book. Even guys who sue you, you don't burn the bridges.
Mark Robuchon.
Because you don't know there may be a good deal around the corner. They may feel guilt. They may feel guilty. You might get something back. You just don't know. It's just been wonderful. Most things have worked out quite well. We've created a lot of wealth, I think. Guys like a guy like Bob Johnson with BET, the first black billionaire. To this day, I have a great relationship with Bob, and we're working together to try and make portability in 401(k) plans doable for low-income people so that they don't go back to zero every time they change jobs. I mean, those kind of things. Good. That you're in a position in life to try and think about where your money could do the most good. Whether you put your money in medical research, what do you do with it?
Those are just wonderful things to be able to do at this stage of life is to think about who else can you help.
Try to get one to two more if we can, John, from the audience before we have to wrap. I think Steve Cahall over there, if I'm not mistaken.
Thank you. Steve Cahall from Wells Fargo. John, I just wanted to go back to your cable industry commentary around capital expenditure decelerating. Maybe the market's also telling us that while that happens, a lot of the top line trends will remain challenged, however rational fight or will it might be, it seems here to stay. I guess the question is, do you think that the strategy can still work if the revenue of the U.S. and the industry remains under sustained pressure? Derek, on F1, we've got two exciting teams joining next year with Cadillac and Audi. What do you do to help ensure those teams are competitive? It seems like a big opportunity to grow U.S. with a native team, Germany with a native team.
How are you thinking about what F1 can do with some of its new members to keep them in the top tier? Thanks.
On the first question, I would say it depends on the regulators in the jurisdiction. If regulators are willing to go for efficiency and allow consolidation or joint efforts or back scratching, whatever you want to call it, to move forward quickly, I think you can see a stable utility-type industry emerge. If they want to keep the two cats' tails tied together hung over the clothesline, tearing each other's guts out, it is going to be a challenge. I mean, that is the way I look at it. I just look at our example would have been Sirius XM, right? When it was XM versus Sirius, they were both going broke. When the regulators finally relented and allowed those two companies to merge, it created a very valuable enterprise. Our timing was just very good investing in it. MELS was very bad.
I think a lot of it has to do with rationalization. At some point, it doesn't make sense for people to pour capital into competitive situations that don't make economic sense. They're going to find solutions other than cutting price to try and gain share in a fixed variable equation. To me, it's going to be jurisdiction by jurisdiction. What we're seeing is countries like Belgium, for instance, are encouraging the development of a concept called a netco, where the two competitors collectively own the backbone network. I'm hoping we see this same evolution in other areas. I think that that's going to be necessary in these situations where there's just way too much money being spent on defensive capital. It's just not rational. It has to lead to consolidation, but I can't predict when or necessarily where.
I think where it does happen, I think it makes these businesses investable.
Do you want to touch on the new entrants?
Yeah, no, I think, as I said earlier, we're very excited about Cadillac and Audi coming in. Cadillac, as we all know, is a new team to the grid, Audi taking over an existing one. I think Stefano tries to make sure playing fields are level and everyone has the same resources and access. We obviously want not just those two teams to be competitive, but every team to be competitive. That's something that we strive to do across the board. I think that's happened over the years. That's another thing that's just led to the tremendous amount of fan interest that we have with Stefano. I don't know if you want to add to that. That's probably the last one.
Thank you, John. I think that, as I said, our goal is to make sure that our conditions were tracked, in this case, in manufacturing and in the industry also for us. If you think about Audi as an answer in this moment where the big industry of automotive in all around the world are suffering and there can be invested for one, that means that we are offering the right model in terms of technology, it could be sustainable to a decentralization project up in England.
Of course, it's a multi-score dimension that is totally different for mobility, but I would say knowing that room very, very well, the fact that they are in and they're going to be in with a long-term journey means that exactly what we did is to make sure that the conditions are for them the right one to develop a new opportunity in this context. For Cadillac, definitely, I wouldn't want to forget Ford. They're going to be an enabler to attract even more awareness in this country. Definitely, you're going to see already this weekend in Las Vegas, it's five. Cadillac is not there yet. They've invested a lot. They want to promote the brand. They want to promote Formula 1. That's really our goals. As I said, for us, it's the new era.
It's the new opportunity to make sure that all the teams we play fairly together. If there would be gaps that I think that we have today, there are rules that allow the teams to be faster, getting back to the competitive tool itself. It's really great to see in this moment where all the motor leaders is in a big crisis, that everyone wants to be part of us. That's really an incredible thing that we need to keep focusing because in opportunity to them, and it's an opportunity for us to increase for the long term.
Great. I think unfortunately, we have reached time. We thank you all for joining for Investor. I'll turn it to Derek for some closing comments.
Yeah, just a few words to close. First of all, thank you all for coming and taking the time to do this. Hopefully, you found it helpful and informative. I want to say thank you to Stefano and Carmelo and their teams, Brian, for their presentations today. We have members of our board here. Thank you guys very much. Also to the broader Liberty Media team. I mean, it takes a lot to put something like this on. I think that everyone's been working hard. Thank you all very much. I thank the Liberty Media team here in Vegas for what they're going to put on this weekend. Then specifically, I'd like to thank Shane, as we already have, but one more time for all of her contributions. All of her contributions over the years. Shane, thank you very much.
I think that you can all tell too that Shane is expecting, so congratulate you on that. Her husband, who's a doctor, is actually here just in case something were to have happened. Finally, also Shane's team, Amber and Mary Anne, who I think played a huge role in this. Thank you guys very much. We'll go. Finally, I want to thank John for taking time out of his schedule. John only travels as a day trip these days. He's not allowed to go overnight.
That's it.
We appreciate getting one of your slots this year and having you come do this. I think more importantly, as everyone here in the audience knows, John has obviously been a leader and innovator, a titan of industry. I think multiple industries, whether it's media, sports, cable, telecom, e-commerce.
Brand names.
Force racing, hotels in Ireland, and a master conservationist too. John, for all of your contributions, not only to Liberty and to all of us here, I think, but American, our global industry in general, it's been great having you. Thank you for coming today.
Thank you, Derek.