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Searchlight Capital Partners is a private, global investment firm with offices in New York, London and Toronto, that has been dedicated to investing in companies, both in the capital as well in the debt of attractive companies in a broad range of industries.
Established in 2010 by Eric Zinterhofer, Oliver Haarmann, and Erol Uzumeri, its founding partners, in its portfolio Searchlight Capital Partners has food, insurance, education, energy, medical care, manufacturing, and media companies, including Alan Sokol´s Hemisphere Media Group, which it injected capital into in 2016, and Liberty Latin America, that operates stations in Puerto Rico, Chile, and the US.
Univision had been going through a tempest of debt —which at the end of 2018 reached US$7,400 million— and low revenue due to the irruption of digital platforms in the industry. Last year it was learned that the company had been offered for sale as a strategy to improve their finances.
In 2016, they had bought Gawker Media, which included the news sites Gizmodo and The Onion, in an attempt to attract younger audiences. Last year they sold these properties without achieving results.
In spite of this, the Hispanic network has remained for 16 years among the five main open television networks in primetime with Hispanic adults ages 18-49 in the US and is now one of Searchlight´s biggest media, which, for this operation has added to the operations area ForgeLight, an operating and investment company dedicated to media and consumption technology sectors, recently founded by Wade Davis, investment banker, businessman, high operations executive for almost 30 years, and recently Chief Financial Officer (CFO) at Viacom.
The third leg of this partnership, Televisa, enabled in Univision the development of successful binational projects such as the sports channel TUDN, as well as the launch of productions from Patricio Wills´ Fábrica de Sueños, that has engaged the Hispanic audience. The Mexican network`s new bet is the launch of Univision LatAm as a pay TV channel in the region.
