EMG and Gravity merger: New opportunities and what the deal means for clients

Gravity Media’s Westworks production centre in London.

The deal to combine EMG and Gravity Media will create a production services giant, with more than 100 outside broadcast trucks and flypacks and 40 studios and production facilities across Europe, the Middle East, the US and Australia. In addition, the combined business will have 30 offices across 12 countries, with a total of 2,000 permanent employees.

Shaun Gregory, global chief executive of the combined businesses, spoke about the reaction of clients and the “great opportunity” of rolling out more services in the US.

He said: “This is an industry that’s experienced a lot of turmoil, and a lot of companies have fallen by the wayside. You now have a significant piece of consolidation, with two great companies that will provide stability, along with more products and services, so that’s something [customers] should be excited about it.

“This industry needs consolidation, and these businesses need investment to give customers the confidence that they can deliver to a high quality, and you can’t do that without the scale and the attributes that we’ve got with this deal.”

John Newton, founder and chairman of Gravity Media, said that together, the group will offer new products, new services and enter new markets. He said: “If you look at our matrix of the countries we operate in as a combined business and the services that we offer across the group, we don’t necessarily offer all of those services to all of those markets.

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“So there’s a process of saying, ‘If we do speciality cameras and RF, and we do it well in Europe and in Australia, should we not be doing it in the US as well?” The ultimate goal, Newton said, will be to provide a universal offering, depending on the level of demand in each market.

Picking up on the point, Gregory spoke about the opportunities presented by countries such as Germany, where EMG is “pretty much studio-based, and then you’ve got the production and facilities that the legacy Gravity organisation offers that aren’t in most of our markets”.

Gregory added: “If you look at all those geographies, we have to ask, ‘What can we offer that we do very well, that customers value us for that we can then take to those markets?’ And then, you’ve got new markets on top of that, of which there are many – plus existing markets, where we can scale up, like the US which is a great opportunity because everything we do in all the different component parts is world class and renowned so we wouldn’t be taking stuff over to the US that people aren’t going to be aware of. So there are some great opportunities.”

London facilities

Between the two organisations, EMG and Gravity Media have a host of facilities and offices in and around London, including a production centre in Chiswick and a newer production centre at Westworks on Wood Lane, west London. In addition, Gravity has a base in Watford just outside London where among others its UK management team is based along with rental and systems integration teams. Some 20 miles west, is EMG’s UK head office in High Wycombe.

“We’ve built phase one of Westworks, and we’re now building phase two, and we will migrate technical services and others from Chiswick,” said Newton. Referring to EMG and Gravity’s Watford and High Wycombe bases, he said: “Ultimately, for efficiency, they should be in a single location that can accommodate the scale of what’s required, but there’s leases in place so that’s not something that’s going to happen overnight.”