Informa plc

Hang on one second. Are we ready to go? It's a bit like church. No one ever wants to sit in the front pew. Are you ready to go? Will I? Well, just give you a minute. Good. Good morning, everyone. who's here in person. We were having a bit of a book as to how many people would turn up in person, given it's A, we've actually announced our results before in the pre-close, and B, it's Friday. So we thought we'd do our results on Friday to see if we could stimulate less working from home. So well done for everyone who's turned up. And to those who are on the webcast, which does slightly outnumber the people in the room, I hope you can follow very clearly. Usual format, myself and Gareth, and then we'll throw it open to questions. We'll try and do this as a bit of a click because some of it will be familiar. But we've also tried in the second half of the presentation to give a little bit more color on how we're thinking about the future of the business. So hopefully that will be useful and interesting for everyone. We theme today's presentation Momentum and Growth. We feel that's a pretty fair and objectively accurate summary of where the business is. We've been recovering through COVID, building momentum, and we step into 24 from 23 with a real sense of momentum in all parts of the business. And as you can see in the hard numbers, a clear path to continuing growth. The backdrop for us is no different than it is for everybody else. We're all living in an increasingly uncertain world, whether it's uncertainty over the cost of capital, whether it's uncertainty about the horror of military conflicts in some parts of the world, whether it's the fact that half the world is deciding who should be responsible for governing them. in 2024. So there's a lot of change that we're facing into. I think one of the strengths of our business is that over the last decade, we've built a very strong geographical platform in the five major geographies of the world. And I'll talk a little bit about that later on in the presentation. But net, we feel that despite that geopolitical nervousness, we are well balanced and well set to be able to continue to deliver what we've set out to do. Our business operates in what we've called for many years now the knowledge and information economy, a place where having original content, proprietary data, intellectual property, and a unique value add, whether that's in the academic markets business or the B2B markets business, gives you a moat of defense. Not in perpetuity, but it gives you a starting place which gives you real strength. The two sweet spots of our business are live and specialist. We have a view, which I think is being borne out, that as the world becomes progressively more digital, the only thing more valuable than digital is live. You see that most evidently probably in sports and music, but we are definitely seeing it in our B2B business. And in the knowledge market, being a generalist is a tough spot to be. You see that in many businesses. But being a specialist, that's a strong spot to be. And we have pursued a path of specialism as a means of differentiating our various products and services. And you can see the value of specialization in each of our markets, whether it's in live and on demand in the B2B market, whether it's in the emerging market for digital demand, lead generation, and buyer intent that we're stepping into through the partnership or proposed partnership with TechTarget, or whether it's in the academic markets area where the increasing investment in original research by countries and institutions around the world is providing primary growth in that market. And the question is, how do we convert an unfair share of that? So we think our mission statement as a company, championing the specialist, is a very powerful place to be. It resonates across all of our markets. I think it resonates well for colleagues in the company. And it speaks to our customers who rightly regard themselves as operating in very specific areas that require a high degree of market knowledge to be a partner for them. And alongside that, you need brands. You need to build a position that's distinctive and original. There's a difference between a name and a brand. There's a difference between an identity and a brand. And we are trying to further enhance our brands, whether it is in the academic markets or the B2B business. And we'll talk about that in the second half of the presentation. To get to the numbers, 2023, we don't say these often. I think I can accurately say that in what passes for a constructive and effective working relationship between myself and Richard, I'm the one who's normally saying, don't be so boastful. But I think we can say unequivocally that 2023 was a standout year for this company. on pretty much any measure. In January 2023, if someone had said, here are the numbers for the year, would you take those? We would have questioned whether that was possible. The business came back at a pace and rate that was impressive, and our ability to be able to meet that demand was equally impressive. The growth rates speak for themselves. We saw the margin tick up to pretty much where we wanted it to be and give us a platform for further margin growth going into 2024. And we saw the return of our cash flows. And importantly, we did all of that whilst maintaining both an opportunistic approach. and effective approach to spot acquisitions whilst retaining a very strong balance sheet. And that allowed us to return quite a significant amount of capital to shareholders in both rising dividends and buybacks. So net, a strong performance for 23, but as everyone on the webcast and in the room knows, that was yesterday, and the real question is, what is there to come in 2024? So what are the drivers of momentum and growth in 2024? And this is, if you like, the building blocks of how we think you could think about where the company is and where there is an opportunity to believe the growth story. The first is in our international reach. We are having this conversation here in London. We're listed here. We're domiciled here. But we are a truly international business, and our expansion internationally is really serving us extremely well. Our biggest market is the United States, but we have placed positions in Europe, in what we call IMEA now, India, Middle East, and Africa, in ASEAN, in mainland China, in Hong Kong. and indeed here in the United Kingdom. That is allowing us to take a maximum opportunity of our increasingly large brand portfolio to be able to further expand our revenues in those geographies. The markets that we serve are by and large markets that we have chosen, and we chose them because we believe those were markets that had the long-term features of structural growth. International, high margin, extended supply chain, subject areas of interest, new subjects, growth areas for R&D investment. And so we are both geographically and by sector or subject area facing into market growth opportunities. Sitting here in March, we've got pretty good revenue visibility in this business. We've traded nearly half a billion of our revenues. We can see another billion in our bookings. So nearly 45% of our revenue we can already see. And our pacing numbers, which are the numbers that we track to give ourselves confidence on our forecasts, are significantly ahead of where they were for our top brands this year versus last year. And our balance sheet remains robust, and we'll come back to that when we talk about our capital allocation framework. So that combination of what we've traded already in 2024, of which most recently the highlight was this week in Riyadh, where we saw the third edition of our new event, new brand, Leap, which we created in partnership with our partners in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. I'll give you a little bit of color on that event later in the presentation. but it really has gone from a standing start to be a leading brand in the market in a very short period of time. Subscription revenues across the portfolio, whether it's Omdia or in Taylor & Francis or in Kuranos or IGM, give us an underpinning of revenue repetition, and our annual contract values are performing strongly and at the levels that we would want them to be, and our forward-pacing numbers, as I say, in live and on-demand are strong. So now we go into 2024 with growth and momentum. And I'm just going to pass over to Gareth to take you through the details of the outcomes in 23 and what we're guiding to in 2024. Gareth.

Thank you, Stephen. Good morning, everyone. And good morning to everyone in the room here for the live event. And good morning to everyone on the webinar or watching live or on demand. I'm going to talk you through a couple of slides on the 2023 four-year results and then move on into the 2024 trading that we're seeing. And I'm also going to talk about how our effective capital management continues to deliver strong shareholder returns across 2023 and into 2024. I'll start by outlining some of the financial headlines in the four-year results. Our revenue was £3.19 billion, which the eagle-eyed amongst you will note is exactly £300 million more than we delivered in 2019 before we started any of the informer intelligence disposal process. We delivered another year of strong underlying revenue growth, the second consecutive year of 30% year-on-year underlying revenue growth, and reported OP increased by 72% to £854 million, which in turn drove up the earnings 86% to 45.3 pence per share. We delivered a strong cash flow performance in the year, free cash flow of £632 million up 51%, And that cash flow performance, together with our balance sheet strength, enabled us to deliver over £700 million worth of shareholder returns across a combination of our progressive dividend policy and our share buyback programme. We finished the year with leverage of 1.4 times, which together with our free cash flows increasing in 2024, gives us considerable opportunity and optionality around capital allocation going into the new year. As Stephen talked about in his piece just now, 2023 was really a standout year in terms of the trading performance of the business. And as you can see outlined on this slide, what that enabled us to do is to regularly and consistently upgrade our view of what the four-year outturn was going to be for the financial year. Driven by the strength of the live and on-demand commercial model in our B2B markets, but supported by good performance from Taylor & Francis in terms of its trading. Those upgrades, as you can see, were across revenue, OP, and operating profit margin across the year, as all three metrics increased driven by the revenue performance and our strong operating leverage in the business dropping through to the bottom line, increasing the margin by almost five percentage points year on year. And this momentum is continuing into 2024, which I'll talk about in a bit more detail on a later slide. Focusing on the income statement, we delivered reported revenue growth of 41% and underlying revenue growth of 30%, delivered, as I said, by the return of the live and on-demand B2B event commercial model in all regions and all markets. So we're now trading fully in all markets and regions, and we're trading at strength and scale in all markets and regions through 2023 and into 2024. We delivered OP growth, reported growth of 72% and underlying growth of 59%, driven by strong operating leverage in the business and disciplined cost management as we return to scale operations. The net finance cost was £19 million for the year, which is obviously a very low result for us in terms of comparison to recent years, driven by a combination of the high cash balances we started the year with and the high interest rates that we were earning on those cash balances. And we'll see a bit of an increase, I think, in that finance cost line in 2024. The effective tax rate was 18.7%, a bit lower than the 19% that we guided to at the half year. And in the medium term, we still expect that to tick upwards to 21% to 22% over time, driven primarily by the OECD minimum tax proposals and a little bit of an impact of the higher UK corporation tax rates. The non-controlling interests increased year on year, but the number that's come out of it is pretty much in line with our guidance. That's been driven by the higher profitability in areas like the Chinese JVs that we operate in B2B markets, Kuranos, and the Taha Luft entity in Saudi Arabia. And then weighted average shares finished the year around 1.4 billion benefiting from the share buyback program under which we have bought back and canceled around about 180 million shares since that program started. Which together with the trading results produced an 86% year on year growth in earnings. So turning to the divisional numbers, we'll unpick these on a division by division basis in a bit more detail. But the headline is that if you look across all the divisions, we've delivered strong underlying revenue growth and OP growth across the businesses in 2023. Informal Markets has now seen a full return of live and on-demand B2B events. Really, the last places to reopen in 2023 were in China and Hong Kong. China trading above 2019 levels in the year, and Hong Kong pretty close to it in its first year of operating since 2019. And That trading result, together with value-based pricing that we're seeing in that business and the operating leverage, produced an almost 10 percentage point increase in the margin for that division year on year. Informa Connect is benefiting from a strong demand for content-rich live experiences. And again, the operating leverage there increased the margin in that division by about four percentage points year on year. And also we're seeing an improving mix in the quality and strength of that business, which Stephen's going to expand on a bit more in the second half of his presentation. Whilst talking about informal markets, Informa Connect, we should just touch on Tarsus, which is now fully integrated into those divisions, around 70% of it into informal markets and around about 30% into Informa Connect. Tarsus delivered a very strong result in 2023, delivering around about 55% underlying revenue growth and delivering an outright revenue number ahead of our guidance at the time of completing the acquisition. Informa Tech was definitely the business that traded into the toughest end market in 2023. But despite that, we managed to deliver 6% underlying revenue growth and a percentage point increase in the operating profit margin in the year. But we're excited about the opportunities for that business in the medium term, as you've seen by the announcement of the TechTarget deal and our commercial rationale for that transaction. Iris is really a story about execution at the moment, about continued operational progress and expansion across our B2B markets businesses and about onboarding our new acquisitions and additions to the portfolio as quickly as possible. Permissioned B2B audience increased to over 20 million pound, 20 million people in the year. And in terms of what we're seeing in the business, we're definitely seeing an improvement in the operational effectiveness of our marketing to our existing customers through Iris. And we're also seeing a beginning of enhancements to the B2B customer experience in areas like lead insights that, again, Stephen will expand on a bit more in the second half of his speech. Taylor & Francis in 2023 delivered revenue growth of 3%, underpinned by a robust performance in the pay-to-read business and also by further expansion in volumes in open research. The operating profit margin of that business was consistent year-on-year at 35%, and we're excited about further opportunities for acceleration in the growth in that business in 2024. So overall, at a group level, this added up to 30% underlying revenue growth, almost 60% underlying operating profit growth, all of which we think demonstrates the value of our products to our customers in an increasingly digital world. So this is a bridge from our underlying growth to our reported growth in 2023, showing why in both revenue and OP terms, the reported growth was higher than the underlying growth. And before we start kind of walking across that bridge, I think it's worth just focusing on the left-hand column there and the underlying growth for the business. So the reported growth really isn't a factor of things like acquisitions in the year. It really is driven by the underlying performance, 30% revenue growth and 60% profit growth in the business year on year. The phasing adjustment is entirely due to biennials. Although 2023 is a biennial up year, so you'd normally expect the bridging item here to be positive, the drag effect of COVID on the 2021 comparative for those biennials means that in actual fact, the bridging item from underlying to reported is a negative number. The portfolio expansion is the additions that we've made to the portfolio in the year, which is really 75% Tarsus and Winsight supported by some other smaller additions. And finally, the currency movement is minimal as the main currency that we trade in, the US dollar, was very stable across 2023 at around about 1.25 exchange rate. The outcome of that is very strong reported growth, 41% growth in revenue and 72% in growth in OP margins. The next slide outlines how the margin has increased from 22% to 27% across the full year. The largest block, as you can see there, is performance, and this is basically the operating leverage from our 30% underlying revenue growth. We've continued to have tight cost management around the business, but we also continue to balance that up with the opportunity for investment, in line with the areas we've talked about in terms of our Gap 2 strategy to fuel and accelerate future revenue growth in the business. The phasing in biennials arises from 2023 being an up year in terms of the biennial business and those up year biennials are a bit more profitable. Portfolio expansion benefits from the acquisition of higher OPE businesses like Tarsus and Windsight. As I said just now, the currency effect is minimal. because the dollar has been pretty much unchanged across the year. A continuing OP margin is something that we will be targeting in 2024. But as we say consistently, we value repeatable, sustainable underlying revenue growth just as highly as we value increases in the margin. So whilst targeting an increase in the margin, we will also be looking to make continued targeted investments in our business to accelerate future growth. Looking at the balance sheet, our first maturity is in October 2025, which is our €700 million tranche EMTN. And after that, the next maturities are in February 2026 for the RCF and then the summer of 2026 for the next EMTN tranche. We have no group-level financial covenants, so the constraining factor really On our finances is our liquidity, and we finished 2023 with £1.5 billion of liquidity. Our debt is secured on fixed interest rates of about 3.2%. That means in 2023, we benefited from having fixed interest rate borrowings in an environment that saw higher interest rates in the market. whilst we benefited in our interest receivable line from having floating interest rate deposits on the higher cash balances that we were running, benefiting our interest income receivable. Our year-end pension surplus is over £40 million, which is pretty small really in the overall scale of our business. So in summary, we finished 2023 with leverage at 1.4 times. We have £1.5 billion worth of liquidity. and we have strong and growing free cash flow generation heading into 2024, all of which provides opportunity and optionality around our capital allocation. So that was the story behind the strong trading performance in 2023 and the optionality we have in the year-end balance sheet. We're now going to focus on the momentum of trading into 2024 and what we intend to do around capital allocation going forward. So to start the slide, one thing you've got to do is start by looking at the platform we've built as a business, and that is a platform that is highly cash generative in terms of our ability to turn operating profits into cash through our operating cash conversion. We generate scale amounts of operating cash flow, and that's dropping through into the free cash flow line with our guidance of $720 million plus for 2024. And that cash flow strength is what gives us the optionality and opportunity around our capital allocations. The first capital allocation opportunity is the organic investment into our business through CapEx to drive organic growth. And we have a continued focus on appropriate and targeted CapEx investment to drive growth. And that investment is somewhere around about 3% to 4% per annum of revenue. We have a progressive approach to dividends, which will see us grow our dividends over time as our earnings grow in the business. And we will then make inorganic investment in the businesses through targeted portfolio additions, exercising our M&A discipline that we think we've shown over recent years, and leveraging our management experience over a number of years of delivering acquisitions and value creation in this space. And the areas we'll be targeting are all consistent with our Gap 2 strategy that we've outlined to you previously. Share buybacks are a core part of the capital allocation policy, but will flex with the outcome of the inorganic investment decisions that we make. We're continuing share buybacks into 2024. We've done about £90 million year to date up until the announcement. And we're announcing a further £250 million of share buybacks in today's announcement, taking you to a total base commitment for 2024 of £340 million as we stand. Target leverage is in the range one and a half to two and a half, which gives you a sense of the triangulation of the capacity available for us in terms of inorganic investment and share buybacks in 2024. And we think that target leverage is consistent with maintaining our investment grade credit rating, which is something that we have targeted over time. You also need to remember when looking at that capital allocation approach there, The future sources of acceleration that exist from our portfolio of retained investments are outlined there on the right-hand side of the slide. These investments allow the opportunity of future value creation and crystallization in the business, and therefore future cash generation and incremental capital allocation opportunities for us going forward outside of the free cash flow that we're guiding to and that the business can generate. So that's our approach to capital allocation, and we're confident that will deliver increasing and shareholder returns over 2024 and beyond. Then finally, just coming back to the guidance, as you've seen in the announcement, we're increasing the guidance ahead of what we said in our 10th of January trading update by £25 million worth of revenue and £5 million of OP. And that really is driven by the trading we've seen year to date in Q1 and our outlook and visibility forward into the first half of the year. As well as the increase in the guidance, it's worth just reflecting on what the guidance says in outright terms. In revenue growth, we're guiding to high single digit. In OP growth, we're guiding to double digit growth. In free cash flow, we're guiding to £720 million worth of cash flow, which, depending on what assumptions you make about the share price, is a free cash flow yield north of 6% for 2024. As I look back across the earnings season, there are not many groups you're seeing guiding to guidance numbers for 2024 of that strength, and at that size. And to confirm, back to the previous slide, any inorganic growth opportunities from our capital allocation are on top of that guidance. So as I wrap up and hand back to Stephen, just to recap there, strong trading performance, a standout performance in 2023 from the business, but importantly with momentum continuing into 2024. And alongside the effective capital management, we think that is really delivering the opportunity to maximise shareholder returns heading into 2024. Stephen.

Thank you very much. Right. Just before we head into questions, I thought what we'd do in this section is maybe just put a little bit more colour around the business in the way in which we're thinking about it and how we're growing and developing it. The first is just to talk a bit about the power of live. I suspect none of this will be new to people, but it gives you a flavor of the conversations that we find ourselves having with many of our partners around the world, whether that be cities or governments or venue operators or city-state or state-based governments or indeed trade association and other commercial partners. Mice is the term of jargon for that industry. meetings, incentives, conferences, and expos. And in many parts of the world, MICE is a strategic vertical for the country. And we're seeing that particularly in our EMEA business and our ASEAN business and in our Chinese business and in some parts of North America where locations are making strategic investment decisions on airport capacity, convention capacity, infrastructure capacity, hotel builds at all tiers. And therefore, if you can have a counterparty conversation where you have a brand portfolio and an ability to bring the sort of community that they're interested in bringing to that location, that creates a really very mutually beneficial discussion. Because whilst it's attractive for us, and Gareth's talked about what that produces for us in numbers in 23 and what we believe it might produce in 24, actually, for the counterparty, they're interested in what they would call the multiplier effect. And in the market, the view generally is that the multiplier effect can be anywhere from 7 to 10 times. So whatever we may look to achieve commercially, the knock-on effect, the multiplier effect in the location is significant. And as I said in my opening comment, one of the maybe slightly perverse consequences of both digitalization and indeed post-COVID return is that the value of live has gone up. Participation levels has gone up. If you're operating in the area of the market where there is distinctiveness and brand value. So then if you take that kind of sector view of the value of live, what have we built and bought over the last 10, 15 years to give us a market position to be able to have counterparty conversations that allow us to develop at the sort of growth rates that we're talking about? Here we've taken our brands and we've used some rough metrics to divide them into more manageable chunks, marquee brands, power brands, market brands, national brands. Really, these are just businesses and brands operating in certain locations or certain sectors, which gives you a real sense of the depth of the portfolio. In marquee brands, we've used 30 million plus as a threshold because many of them exist above it, and I know a number of you will say, well, that's really interesting. Can you tell me exactly what's the revenue number for super returns? So just before you ask the question, the answer is no. But what we're giving you here is an indication of the scale of these franchises. The growth rates of these franchises are also very attractive. Now, we are a buyer in the market for these brands and these products, so we have a very developed understanding of the value of these assets, both to us and indeed what their long-term annuity value is in the way in which you can own them. And more importantly, we have a much more developed understanding of how you can expand services and attractive benefits for the customers and the users of those brands so you can expand the revenue and, indeed, the margin profile. Similarly, to expand my earlier points geographically, this is the geographic spread of the company. Now, for those of you who have been around the Informa company for a long time, you will remember when, if we presented that chart, we would have had one pillar, and it would have been in the Middle East. So we've built a platform. So when we talk about a platform, we talk about a market position. The company really is at a different stage of development and market opportunity, whether it's in the Americas, which is our biggest market and is, in fact, 55% of the global trade show business. It's no surprise that that's our biggest market. It's also the highest margin market because they have a very developed set of infrastructure and therefore the key input price in that business, which is real estate, is generally lower square meter for square meter in the U.S. than it is anywhere else in the world. ASEAN, which is a significant trading bloc and expanding in multiple countries and the trading relationships between themselves and becoming an increasingly important manufacturing center, which is particularly critical to the trade show community. We are the market leader. We are in every one of the major economies. And in all four or five of the major countries in the ASEAN bloc, Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia in particular, You're seeing significant investment in new convention capacity, airport capacity, hoteling, and access capability. Europe, you probably know about as well as I do. We're actually less represented in Europe, largely because Germany in particular is, in effect, a home market. It's largely not represented. but certainly the significant players in the German market are the German messes. And so in the main, we have slightly removed ourselves from the market beyond taking the occasional brand into it for location purposes. But nevertheless, we have some strong positions in a couple of areas, and we've developed an increasingly attractive joint venture relationship through our partnership with Bologna Fiera to expand our position in the European market that way. China, mainland China, and Hong Kong. Hong Kong is probably the last geographical area in the world where we will see post-COVID return in 2024, because in 2023, the international travel patterns hadn't really fully rectified and reset in 2023. And then you get to IMEA, which is a new construct for us in the last 12 months. Previously, we used to have India as part of Asia Pacific, and the Middle East and Africa was combined with Europe. We split that out to create a new geography, IMEA, because those locations for us have a series of very similar features. Most notably, they're all very high-growth markets, and we're the market leader in every single one of them. in Turkey, in Egypt, in India, in Saudi Arabia, and in the United Arab Emirates. All of them similarly investing in capacity and venues and airports and access and infrastructure, and in some cases liberalizing their economies as a result of social change and policy change in order to significantly accelerate international foreign direct investment, which of course is catnip to our product portfolio and our brand portfolio. And we are really doubling down both our time and our presence and our participation in those markets. And we call that out in today's announcement. So I thought I'd double down even further and just give you a couple of examples. Here are a couple of brands that really do stand out. And I've chosen these two, or we've chosen these two, because they are the yin to each other's yang. If you've been around the live and on-demand business for a long time, Arab Health is what I would call trade show royalty. It's been around for nearly 50 years. If you imagine that, it's easy to say 50 years ago, coming up with the idea to create a global healthcare manufacturing meeting and convention point in Dubai. It might be obvious now, but 50 years ago, that was a lot less obvious. It's grown from that entrepreneurial idea into the leading healthcare show in the world. And in fact, we have developed out of that a sub-brand called MedLab, which specializes in medical laboratory technology deployed in hospitals and healthcare institutions around the world because, of course, technology is a horizontal, and in the healthcare community, it's the biggest feature of capital expenditure for many healthcare providers and operators. The combination of Arab Health and Medlab is, for us, a north of $90 million franchise, growing at significantly high double digits. It's rich in content, it's rich in professional accreditation, it's rich in customer data, it's growing in capacity, and indeed in the location in which it operates in Dubai, they are expanding, and not next year, but the year after, the venue capacity grows again in 26 onwards as a result of World Expo, which brought new capacity into that market. And for any of you who've been to Dubai, you will know that they've also invested significantly in any tiered level of hoteling accommodation. So it is a place where you can bring 100,000 people and all the necessary contractors you need to be able to scale and stage a large-scale event. By contrast, in technology innovation, this is the brand that I referred to earlier. Leap was our entry brand into the Saudi Arabian market in our joint venture, Tarlouf. They had identified future technology innovation and AI as an area where they wanted to be a standout, distinctive point of difference versus the rest of the market. And we invented this notion of LEAP for future technologies, new technologies, innovative technologies, whether it be from big tech, mid tech, small tech, investors, entrepreneurs, start-ups. LEAP's in its third year. And look at some of these data points. 1,800 exhibitors, over 50% of which are international. 170,000-plus attendees. over 4.9 trillion of money under management for investors attending. We had over 650 start-ups in the start-up event that was running simultaneous with a large-scale trade show. Much like Arab Health and Med Lab, it's actually a double act. The mothership is LEAP and the innovative... Technology accompaniment is DeepFest, a standalone event focused on AI. Possibly, I think by next year, might be the largest AI event in the world. So you've got a 50-year-old mega brand, marquee brand, which is innovating and still growing at double digits. You've got a brand new brand in a new market that's equally growing at double digits, both of which are being driven by market demand and incremental capacity. Those are the ingredients of how you continue to drive growth and expansion across the business. And it's only two brands out of a portfolio at the marquee level of 20 plus and a national brand or a power brand or a market brand where you can do the maths and you can do the valuation maths of what those might individually be worth. And then you could read that across to our valuation and you can all make those judgments quicker than I can. Underpinning those, what do you also need to do? These days, you also need to be underpinned by data. Like in all businesses, particularly in the knowledge and information market, being a generalist doesn't work. If you want to be a specialist to a specialist, you need to know the what, the who, the why, and the how of what they're interested in, what they're doing, where they're doing it, where they're repeating, where they're spending dwell time, where's their buyer intent, what's their subject matter of interest, what do they want more of, and in real time. That's what led us to our investment in Iris. That's what led us to start generating products like Lead Insight that enabled us to provide some real-time access to our customers and our users so that the event wasn't just a kind of random I got back with 60 new business cards in my pocket. I'm actually getting validated data that allows me to create real return for the investment of my time and my money. Much talk about AI in every business around the world, and quite rightly, I spent two days this week hanging out with the AI community in Riyadh. The pace of innovation, a new product, what's happening with language processing unit capacity, speed, it's really, it's startling. For our business, AI is already significantly embedded in what we do, whether it's at a very simple and practical matter, doing live speech translation or authentication or plagiarism tests or... Manuscript discovery in Taylor & Francis or whether we're using it to do profiling analysis or in degenerative AI in our many digital media brands. But there is much more that we can do. And for our business, it's actually a beneficial both on cost and also on speed and accuracy. And all three of those things speak to our ability to stay relevant to our customers. In our annual report this year when it gets published, what we've done is we've done a little graphic which brings to life, here's how we're using AI at a practical level. So rather than talking about it just sort of conceptually, what does it mean? Is it a major change? We've just broken it down into really very simple case point examples of how can you make this transaction or human activity more efficient, more effective, more accurate? and faster. Similarly I'll show you the same in our academic publishing business in a second. And then alongside that, so you build a geographic franchise everywhere in the world. You become the market leader. You develop your marquee brands. You bring new brands to market. You work with partners to grow capacity and volume. You use data to make your business more relevant. You do it with new products and services that they can buy, which allows you to price and create more revenue growth. And then you underpin that by the deployment of practical AI and digital enablement. But in addition to that, as we built that franchise, we identified that there was another market that was emerging. Cookies were disappearing. Buyer intent was becoming much more a part of the B2B transaction service. And we saw these various players emerging. offering multiplicity of different services. So we created Informatech and we went looking. And that's what led us to the announcement we made in January about the proposed combination between the digital assets inside Informatech and TechTarget to create new TechTarget. There's no particular new news today other than there's a lot of work going on, believe you me. We've appointed a combination director who's working with the management team. We're doing all the work necessary on the historical financial information filings that are needed for the U.S. clearance. The shareholder vote prep is underway. You will see the proxy statements of the business plan in that when it comes out. At the moment, if you want a timing structure for the model about how it's working, we're working on the assumption that the new company will go live on the 1st of October. So in effect, we will trade Informatech as it is for the first three quarters of 2024. And then in the back quarter of the year, we will then have the new company live. which is New Tech Target, which we will be the 57% majority shareholder in. And then 2025 will be the first trading year of that business. What are we seeking to do? We're seeking to do exactly the same as we've done in live and on demand, which is to build a market leader in digital demand services for the B2B community. We believe we have the product suite from market intelligence all the way through to buyer intent, Discovery Services. We believe we have a unique digital media real estate platform and content position, and we have a market-leading position in proprietary data, absolutely coincident with the demise of cookies. We have a high degree of confidence that we can create something really quite distinctive, and over the next three to five years, we'll lay out clearly what the commercial ambitions are in that market. as a consequence of that, but also as a consequence of their own success. And I can say this because Andy Mullins, who's been the leader of that success, is hiding in the cheap seats at the back. Informa Connect has moved from being a business that many years ago was seen as the last redoubt of the old IIR conference businesses, for those who've been around the company for a long time, and actually has morphed into a business clearly focused on six markets, of which the latest category is technology, managing and operating brands and franchises, offering higher content-rich experiences with a high degree of professional accreditation services embedded in the offering. A much more diverse range of revenue sources than the trade show business today, delegate revenue, exhibitor revenue, sponsor revenue, and then professional services and other revenue. A technology stack that actually is quite unified across those different sectors. So we've developed a digitally enabled set of platform services for InformaConnect. And a deep level of market specialism, whether it's in biotech and life sciences, food service, finance, cyber security, anti-aging, and aesthetics and entertainment. And again, we've chosen these markets for very particular reasons, because we believe they have the long-term features of structural growth, particularly energy. the anti-aging and aesthetics market, if you're me. So that's where we are in the B2B market. We feel confident about the market position we've built and bought. We feel ambitious about what we can do in digital services. And we have... a real depth of understanding of the power of our brand portfolio, and we are still energized and excited about the fact that as you move around the geographies of the world, actually, industrially, the sector where we have chosen to build and operate is seen as a major driver of economic activity in geographies around the world. And when you find a counterparty that sees your product as a market enabler, that is a road to opportunity, and we're taking maximum advantage of that. In academic services, this is a business which sometimes is quite difficult to penetrate because one could be forgiven for thinking that it's a rather dry subject matter of academic interest. Actually, underneath the cover, this is a business that has similarly metamorphosed over a decade from being really a product and format business in physical books and physical journals into a very diversified range of service activity for a much broader community of users. Yes, educational institutions, but yes, also funders, yes, also governments, also transnational R&D bodies, and also individuals either self-funding or raising the funding from some of those prior bodies to self-fund. And as a consequence, it's demanded that we develop a range of different services to enable us to stay relevant and also to follow the money. Because in some cases, the money has moved from being solely channeled through libraries into a series of other markets. We don't see this ever being a high single-digit growth market. There aren't the macro features that there are in the B2B markets business. But we have long believed we can get this to a 4%, 4% plus grower. So what do you have to believe that we need to do to this business to enable to achieve that? Well, this is a kind of step point bridge chart that gives you a sense of what are the building blocks of the growth that we're building into this business. The first is where you start in a business like this, which is make sure your subscription engine is working at the pace and rate that you want because that gives you forward visibility and stability in your customer relationships. In the United States in particular, we've long held the view, and for colleagues on this webcast or in the room from Taylor & Francis, You will have heard me say this many times. We're under-indexing in the U.S. market for reasons of history. It doesn't really matter why. So we're investing in just go-to-market capability in the U.S. We believe there's more share we can take from our market position, our backlist and our archive and our intellectual property in the U.S. And the U.S. is the biggest market in this area, much as it is in B2B markets. We've played that movie in B2B markets very effectively. We have some confidence we can do the same thing in this market. Read and publish. This is the world we're now living in. We resisted it for a while. We then started to learn how to do it. We then acquired some business. We've now built some industrial capability. We've become much more contractually and commercially adept about how do you sit across the table from your customer and provide them with a set of commercial and contractual freedoms that enable them to read and publish in the way in which they want and make yourself much more accessible to the author. The volumes in open are growing significantly, and so you have to have a handling capacity to be able to handle that volume. It's very different from pay-to-read. And we're doing that in real time. That speaks to workflow, take you back to AI, it speaks to AI on screening and submission speed, and it also speaks to the way in which you price and how you engage with the originating author. There is also, at the other end, an expansion in premium titles, and that speaks to quality, impact factor, verification, and to a degree, marketing. E-books are growing at speed, and there's an opportunity there to increase our e-book penetration. We're a big reference advanced learning publisher. We publish 8,000, 9,000 new titles a year. We have a significant backlist in 10 subject areas which we could talk about. We are the market leader in those areas. So there's much we can do in e-books, And in e-access and then e-access and audio accompaniment to allow us to expand our market position. And that's before you get to AI's ability to enable you to bring new products. If only running a business was as simple as PowerPoint, we'd have this done already. But what I'm trying to do is give you a sense of what the art of the possible is. And similarly, what does AI enable us to do? This is the part of the business where AI exists. is probably most deployed already. It's inherent in the model. If you just think about the volume of submissions and articles and books that we produce in a year, that can't be done by human labor, and it isn't. And therefore, this is an area where AI becomes an absolute enabler of our ambitions. Put that all in the blender, what does it produce? It produces a business called Informa operating in the knowledge and information economy with a market-leading position in B2B events, transaction events, content-rich events. building a partnership leadership position in B2B digital services. And in that case, that business housed in America, listed in America, domiciled in America, managed in America, because that's where 80%, 85%, 90% of the revenue and profit pool is for those products and services today. a leadership position in academic markets with more to come, both in diversification of services and in AI enablement of service offering. And as Gareth alluded to, on the side, a range of place position investments, some of them for reasons of history. some of them for reasons of innovative investment, such as in Kuranos, and some of them for reasons of enablement. Bologna Fiera, to my earlier comments on Europe, Bridge Events, to my earlier comments on Andy and InformaConnect's platform capabilities inside InformaConnect. It's a platform position in three markets, and that is the foundation for where we see growth coming. And that's really where I started. I've tried to bring to life the international expansion opportunities. It's where I spend most of my life these days, and when you go to those markets, you really do see those opportunities right in front of your nose. We've chosen well, I would say. Now, I'm selling my own book here, but I think we have. Some of that was learned discovery. Some of that was judgment. And a fair smattering of it was luck. But nevertheless, we've ended up serving very, very robust high-growth markets with a significant degree of customer interest. Academic remains a central part of our group, and despite the multiple questions we've had over the years, it has served the company, shareholders, colleagues, and most importantly, our customers extremely well. We've changed that business from what it was to what it is, and we will change it again to what it will be, and that will continue to serve the group well. Revenue visibility is always a big plus. That and the cash generation and the balance sheet strength is allowing us to speak to growth and momentum in 2024. So that's where we are as a company. Thank you very much for listening. And we will throw it open to questions. And we'll start in the room and then come to the webcast, just to give those in the webcast some time. So I'll take maybe two or three questions in the room and then go to the webcast. So why don't we start on the left, my left, if we may. If people could, whilst we know who most people are, if they could name and identify themselves, and no more than three questions at a time.