• by Wayne Friedman , May 15, 2006

A day after it was revealed that a Grupo Televisa-led group of investors made a bid for Univision, now comes word that a group led by none other than Bill Gates' investment company is also in the hunt.

Gates, the chairman of Microsoft Corp., manages private investments through Cascade Investment.

Cascade looks to compete with a Televisa group, which has pooled its resources with four buyout concerns--Bain Capital Partners LLC, Blackstone Management Associates V LLC, Carlyle Investment Management LLC, and Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. L.P.--and Venezuelan billionaire Gustavo Cisneros.

After Univision put itself up for sale in early February, bids for the company initially came in at a slow pace.

Many traditional media companies--Walt Disney Co., Time Warner, CBS--openly balked at the high-cash-flow multiple the company wants. At its current stock price, Univision's total price tag would mean a price just south of $11 billion. Univision is looking for as much as $14 billion, or north of $40 a share. Univision shares rose slightly on Friday, up 0.8 percent to $35.92.

Univision, based in Los Angeles, gets a third of its programming from Televisa, which holds a 16.5 percent stake in the company as of April. Federal rules bar Mexico City-based Televisa from owning more than 25 percent of a U.S. broadcaster.

Univision Communications' first-quarter profit rose 21 percent to $53.9 million. Its Univision and TeleFutura broadcast networks account for about 80 percent of the Spanish-speaking television audience.

Univision's prime-time audience--among the key groups of viewers 18-49--grew 17 percent in 2005, much more than ABC, NBC, CBS, or Fox, the company reported in March.

Starting in a few weeks, Univision--as well as other Spanish-language networks--will for the first time be part of the upfront buying season, in which advertisers will buy commercial time derived from Nielsen Media Research's Nielsen Television Index--the main measurement of TV viewers for the traditional English-language networks. Univision executives expect that the network, along with its impressive viewership gains, will ink big advertising revenues as a result.