Rolex strikes sponsor deal with Larry Ellison’s sailing league

By

Bloomberg

Published



November 21, 2024

Rolex will be the title sponsor of SailGP, the high-speed yachting race series co-founded by billionaire Larry Ellison, in a long-term deal that comes after the Swiss watchmaking giant was elbowed-out as a headline supporter of Formula One. 

Bloomberg

SailGP features a dozen teams competing in identical multi-million dollar, wind-powered catamarans with race speeds nearing 100km an hour. 

Rolex’s deal will run for a decade, said Russell Coutts, the New Zealand yachtsman and SailGP chief executive officer, who co-founded the series with Ellison in 2019. 

“This is by far the biggest partnership in sailing by a fair margin,” Coutts said in an interview regarding the value of the Rolex sponsorship. He declined to give financial details of the 10-year agreement that will see the league renamed the Rolex SailGP Championship. 

After initial funding and financial support from Ellison, the majority of the league’s 12 teams are now privately owned with valuations hitting upwards of $45 million to buy a team, according to Coutts. 

“With any startup entity there’s always questions around how long they are going to last and there were those questions around SailGP when we first founded it,” Coutts said. 

Several of the SailGP race teams are now “cash neutral” and Coutts said he expects “at least a few” teams to be profitable this year.

“We can’t just be successful as a league. We’ve got to be sure our teams are commercially successful as well,” he said.

For Rolex, the biggest Swiss watch brand with estimated annual revenue of more than 10 billion Swiss francs ($11.3 billion), the SailGP title sponsorship offers a fresh avenue to promote its pricey watches among an affluent and sporty young demographic.

“We reach across generations, but SailGP certainly has probably more appeal to a younger and more female audience that can actually enjoy the spectacle without being a super expert in sailing,” said Joël Aeschlimann, international sponsorship manager at Rolex in Geneva. 

Rolex was knocked out as the official timekeeper of Formula One for the 2025 season by rival LVMH, which agreed to a multi-brand, decade-long deal worth a reported $1 billion with annual fees of as much as $100 million to sponsor the top motor racing series.

Aeschlimann said Rolex’s decision to augment its sponsorship of SailGP was unrelated to the change in sponsorship at Formula One. 

Rolex has been involved in sailing for nearly seven decades, dating back to its partnership with the New York Yacht Club in the late 1950s. Current Rolex ambassadors — or “testimonees” as the brand calls them — include sailors such as Sir Ben Ainslie, Hannah Mills and Tom Slingsby.

The top Swiss watch brand is a significant global athletics sponsor focusing on just five sports: tennis, golf, equestrian, motorsports and sailing.

Watchmaker Rolex SA is owned by a Geneva-based trust foundation named for the company’s co-founder Hans Wilsdorf. The Hans Wilsdorf Foundation is a major supporter of the visual and performing arts, environmental causes as well as local needs and services in Geneva. 

The 2025 Rolex SailGP Championship starts this weekend with the Emirates Dubai Sail Grand Prix.

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