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Informa, the UK-listed business events group, will unveil plans to restructure its global operations after completing a £1.2bn acquisition of British rival Ascential on Wednesday.
The FTSE 100 group will also announce that it will enter 2025 with revenues of more than £4bn and with consistent underlying revenue growth of more than 5 per cent after the deal, which was agreed in July.
“As of January next year, we will come to market as three operating businesses,” said Stephen Carter, chief executive at Informa, who has overseen the creation of the world’s largest business events provider in the past decade through acquisitions and organic growth. The company now has a market capitalisation of more than £10bn.
Carter said that Informa had been a “volume-based spot conference operator” when he took over as chief executive in 2013. However, during his tenure, the company has moved away from low-value, high-volume event production and instead focused on building brands around fewer, bigger industrial trade events.
“Ten years ago, our objective was: can we become the biggest player in this market? Which we now are, by some margin.”
The company will create three distinct event businesses, with the key events overseen by Ascential — the Cannes Lions advertising week and fintech fair Money20/20 — joining others such as cyber security conference Black Hat and London Tech Week as Informa Festivals.
Other divisions will comprise a business events group that focuses on areas such as supply chain trade, and Informa Connect — events that bring together industries such as pharmaceuticals, biotech, private wealth and private equity as well as those that require professional content and accreditation.
The group is separately creating a digital services company through the proposed combination of Informa Tech’s digital businesses with Nasdaq-listed TechTarget, which is due to complete this year.
The business events market has rebounded strongly after the end of pandemic restrictions, with trade shows still seen as essential in many industries in bringing together buyers and sellers. While there has been a slowdown in recent months in other sectors that saw a post-pandemic surge such as theme parks, trade events have not seen any similar tailing off in attendance numbers, Carter said.
Informa will also announce on Wednesday that underlying trading performance remained strong, and that it was on track to meet upgraded full-year guidance. This includes double-digit underlying revenue growth, group revenue of more than £3.5bn, adjusted operating profit of more than £970mn and free cash flow of more than £740mn
The company was targeting synergies of about £12mn through the Ascential takeover, Carter said, which would include some job losses. “We don’t need two listings, two head offices, two sets of group functions. But we didn’t seek to add the Ascential business to our portfolio for cost reasons. It will be additive on revenue, profit [and] stable on margins.”
He added that the company was still happy to be listed in the UK, although added that “like all sensible businesses, we review every part of our business on a recurring basis”.
Carter also stressed that the UK stock market needed to remain competitive.
“Would we like to see more equity fund flows into the United Kingdom? Sure we would,” Carter said. “And we’re an international business . . . the UK is not where we make our revenues and our profit. So we need the London exchange to be a highly liquid and attractive destination for international capital.”
