Informa plc

Good morning, everybody, and for those people who have struggled across London to join us in person, thank you very much for coming. As you know, we're great believers in face-to-face meetings that inform us, so it's great to see some people in the room. We've also got a few hundred people on the livestream, so for those of you on the livestream, I hope, A, it's working, and B, we'll make it easy to take questions off the livestream when we get to the Q&A session. We're actually going to do this annual results presentation a bit differently, a little bit of constructive abruption. So we've posted our release for today, so I'm assuming that most people have seen the numbers. And we've got books on the chairs, which have also got some detailed numbers in the appendix. But we're not going to spend too much time on the numbers. We're actually going to just talk a little bit about how we've got to where we are and where this business is going over the next five years. I'll speak for about 15, 20 minutes. Then we're going to do a little demo. And then Gareth is going to answer 400 very tricky questions. That is the flow of the day. So without further ado, let's get started. So first of all, the numbers. 2024, as I said in the release today, really on every measure, 2024 was an outstanding year for our company. Double-digit revenue growth, 20% plus adjusted operating profit growth, double-digit dividend growth. We knocked the ball out of the park on our free cash flow. And the businesses feel strong. We grew internationally. If you look at our three biggest geographic markets, I'll come on to that in a second. the United States, China and Asia, and the GCC in Southeast Asia. We really are growing at a click in all those markets. The investment that we started making during COVID in our enterprise technology platforms, in our data platforms, in improving our products and services is really paying significant dividends, and we feel very confident about 2025. So in short form, that's really what we did in 2024. You see that on the kind of key measures, double-digit underlying growth, very strong financial operating performance, Our margins continuing to tick back up. We've grown our dividends again. We've got a strong balance sheet, so we're recommencing our share buyback program at a minimum of $200 million for the year, and that should underpin our operating performance through 2025. And today, there are two businesses in my session I'm going to talk very much about. We can talk about them as much as people want in the Q&A. And that's our academic markets business and our tech target business. And academic markets, really, it was a great year, 2024. In fact, it was the best ever revenue and performance year for that business in my time in the company. Driven by three things, I would say, in order as it relates to the numbers. The first is efficiency. The world is falling in love with original and specified content, and we have a lot of that. And so we proactively stepped into contractual discussions and negotiations with a series of companies who were interested in our highly specified content. and constructed some really quite well-managed data access archive deals. Some of that revenue is one-off, doesn't repeat. Some of it is recurring. So we've got a recurring performance of around 4% and a one-off outcome in 24%, which is really quite striking. We've actually used some of that cash from those deals to invest further, both in that business and more broadly, and we'll come on and talk about that in a second. Secondly, our open business, which for long-standing and former watchers and TNF watchers will know, really we went from a standing start in the open business It's performing well both in submission volumes and in our ability to handle those submission volumes and in our ability to extend our open and hybrid journal presence. And then thirdly, we brought in some fresh leadership in Penny, Penny Lakin-Brand, who some of you will know. And Penny is doing exactly what those of you who know would expect and what we wanted, which is bringing forensic attention and ambition to both the detail and the delivery in that business. and also looking internationally at what more we can do to take share, grow our market position, and extract more value from the knowledge that we've got. So a business doing well, performing well, and leaning into 2025 with a similar ambition to do 4% growth in 2025. Informa Tech Target I'm not going to get into the detail of because it has a listing in the U.S. We'll be doing a listings, a results presentation in the U.S. in a few weeks. But it remains on plan versus the guidance that we have given the markets. What I want to talk about is this, what we call from endings to beginnings, to be slightly portentous or possibly pretentious. And what I want to do is to kind of go back to go forward. Essentially, the summary of what we're talking about is that what we've done in the last decade and so is we've built a growth platform, particularly in the B2B exhibitions and events market. And it's now very obvious in our numbers. It's very obvious in our portfolio. It's very obvious in our performance. But it was not so obvious 10 years ago. And essentially, the company has gone through a series of chapters, stages. They're not quite as neat as they look on PowerPoint, but the way to really think about them is we devised a strategy, we implemented it, we then survived and thrived on the exit from COVID, and then we accelerated it. And that last chapter finished at the end of 2024. So that period of the company is over. What we're now focused on is what do we do with this growth platform that we've built and grown over that period. Ten years ago, this was the business, the B2B business, if you looked at it. It was effectively a low-to-no-growth business. Even though interest rates were lower in those days, it was effectively a low-to-no-growth business. Today, we're consistently delivering 5% plus revenue growth across a much larger portfolio. Our revenues in that market were about $1.8 billion. In 2025, Proforma will be just north of $5 billion of revenue. Our B2B revenues will be north of $4 billion. Back then, we had about six of what we would call marquee and power brands, so brands with revenues of over $20 million. Now we've got 65, and some of those are way ahead of that number. And I'm going to unpick our brands. And then most materially, our geographic mix was completely different. We were a UK European-centric business, and now we are not. Geographically, if you look at our top three markets, it is the United States of America, China and Asia, and then the UAE Great Corridor. I think the UK is our ninth market geographically. It's about the same size in B2B as Brazil. Important market, but it doesn't rank at the top of the company. We have become a truly international business. We're in a great market. The B2B market is a great market. It's about $30 billion plus of revenue, growing KGAR about 5%. And it's a truly global business. It's an international business, and it has very long-term structural growth dynamics. Cut that market down about half that market is run and owned by trade associations, almost invariably owning one major brand as a function of their relationship with their industry. And the main job of the trade association is mainly lobbying. The event is normally a funding mechanism or a meeting mechanism for the community. We actually have a number of trade association partnerships or ownerships, but they tend to be spot or single brand players. They're not portfolio players by the definition of a trade association. You then have a significant number of entrepreneurs, innovation, startup. If you think of it as a market, there's a lot of new innovation in this market, which is great for businesses like ours if you have a platform because you can spot that innovation, buy it, bring it in, add it to your portfolio, plug, move on, internationalize it, and grow. But you have to have the platform to do that with. And our position in that market is a very strong one. You look at what are the structural growth drivers in that market and just work your way around this circle. I'm not sure I would put it at the top of internationally translatable acronyms, but MICE is the term of art to describe this business, category art. Meetings, incentives, conferences, and exhibitions. And if you wander around the world that I wander around and you talk to governments or governors or states or city-states, for many of those locations, MICE is a primary, one, two, or three, economic strategy lever for driving economic growth because it brings industry specialization, business tourism, traffic, and foreign direct investment. And there are many places around the world, and we've partnered with a number of them. We've announced another partnership today where this has been a way of driving significant GDP and country differentiation. Secondly, business is specialized, and the process of specialization continues apace. We actually see that in our academic business as much as in our B2B business. Subject specialization, category and business specialization. And every time a sector subspecializes, that's an opportunity for a new product for us. That's a new supply chain. That's a new market. That's a new set of competitors. So the market expands because of specialization on a year-on-year basis. Supply chain disruption, which we're seeing a lot of at the moment because of geopolitics, is actually perversely good for the business. Because every time you need to rehouse your supply chain, reset your suppliers, relocate, find a new distributor, find a new market to access, the trade show is a perfect route to market and a very, very efficient one. It's great to have the people in the room, but we've also got a lot of people on live stream. One of the things we found in this business is that the power of face-to-face has gone up as people do less and less face-to-face in their day-to-day activity. And the big get bigger. So if you do have 50 to 100 major brands, the market migrates to the major brands for a number of reasons. And one of those reasons is business travel efficiency. People don't want to do 40 bilateral business trips. They want to do one trip and 40 efficient meetings. And that's nowhere easier than at the single point meeting of an industry or a community. And then finally, a thought for everybody in this room, because I'm going to hazard a guess that if I asked everyone to do a show of hands and maybe on the live stream, are you or are you not a knowledge worker? Are you in a profession which is a knowledge-based profession? And the answer is yes, all of us are. And AI is going to hit the knowledge industries like a tsunami. Because it's going to take a vast range of cognitive process activity out. It's going to be automated. It's going to be instantaneous. It's going to be verifiable. And it's going to free up time. In our business, we don't view it as a burden. We view it as a boon. Because with that freed up time, people, knowledge workers, will have to do things other than process work. Because the value in process work is going to go down. And therefore, there'll be less admin and more added value, less process and more product innovation. And that's great for our B2B business. Because the way in which you get that, the way in which you gain that, is by coming together with your industry, with your community, seeing what's new, seeing what's changing, seeing where the future is going, and less time doing base-level cognitive process activity. So the AI time dividend in our analysis is effectively an expansion of the total addressable market. So those are the structural growth drivers in the market that we've chosen to play in. Equally, look at geographically where the world is going. Where are the growth geographies? And in essence, what we're all seeing around the world is a shift from the UK and Europe to the rest of the world, including North America. North America, as we're all living, has a disproportionate disadvantage because it's the single largest economy in the world, it's a single currency, it's a single market, and it's the global currency, and effectively it controls the financial markets. So net, the U.S. is a distinguishing player. But for the U.K. and Europe, it's a big change. And the rest of the world is offering enormous growth. And we have followed that growth. I've said this internally many times. When I talked to the board back 11, 12 years ago and said, what should our strategy be, I had a map which had a picture of the U.K. and Europe and two big maps of the rest of the world, North America and the rest of the world. We're big here. We need to get small here and big here. And that's basically what we've done. We've become an international business, and we've followed where the growth is. We've also followed where the GDP growth rates are. So if you look at where GDP growth rates are in single or high single-digit growth, they're in countries like the UAE, India, Indonesia, Egypt, Philippines, the U.S. a little bit lower, but the scale of that market makes it very, very attractive. So the shape of the company geographically has changed. And then on top of that, we had to make some decisions about which categories would we choose to build in. We haven't ended up in these categories by accident. We didn't bump into these categories. We took a view that there was some criteria about how should you choose where to pay to play. We made a decision to be a B2B business, not a B2C business. We made a decision to look at very fragmented supply chains, because that's very, very relevant to the product and the service that we offer. That we wanted international communities, not purely domestic ones. That we wanted markets where there are high levels of innovation and where the end market was high margin. And therefore, the customers were more focused on value rather than volume and price. and the end markets where there was structural growth. And in the markets in which we've chosen to play and build our brand portfolio, that's actually largely what you see. And that is also contributing to our growth rate. We now have about 800 individual B2B brands. Many of those are must-attend brands in their markets. And to get into the top 20 in our brand portfolio, the minimum revenue threshold is now $35 million. Ten years ago, I think we had $135 million thereabouts in total in our B2B event portfolio. It's by order of magnitude a completely different portfolio of brands. And what drives inside Informa, on top of those structural growth drivers you see on the left-hand side of that chart, what are we doing inside Informa that isn't unique to us, but we're really doubling down on to extract greater revenues, greater earnings, greater profits, and greater growth? We're doing work on price, price for value, yield, bundling, segmentation, market expansion. We're doing work on market penetration, greater market share, greater market share of participants, greater market share of new entrants into the market. We're doing greater geo-expansion, taking our leading brands from one market to two markets to three markets to four markets, brand expansion, brand syndication, brand internationalization. There's capacity coming into the market. There's probably 20% to 30% new capacity and supply coming into the market in the next five years, particularly in what we call the global gateway cities of the world, which I will unpick a little bit. Historically, as you will know, the revenue model in trade shows was the exhibitors and sponsors pay, the attendees come. Actually, as the value of the product goes up, the exhibitors and the sponsors pay, and the attendees can also see value. And if you can create that as a bundled product, then actually that's an alternative revenue stream. And then finally, there are services you can wrap around that community. We move roughly 6 million people a year around our events, and what you can provide around those event services allow you to develop new products, new services, and expand your revenue line. These are the top eight brands that we have applied our approach to geo-expansion or brand syndication to in pharma, in healthcare, in cybersecurity, in hospitality, in food, in fintech, in aviation, in private capital, in real estate. I think my math is roughly right. Those single brands, and they all started out as single brands, they're now deployed in 80 locations. And that's just eight of the brands. If you take the biggest of those by revenue, WHX, which is our healthcare brand, now $170 million single portfolio, the meeting point for the healthcare industry, both established and innovative. First edition in 1975, 14 editions now in the calendar year spread around the world, and with growth in new venue capacity in six of those locations coming in 2026. Gateway cities, this is the world that I live in. This is the world where our B2B events communities live in. Gateway cities, what are they? They're a concept, they're a brand, they're an idea, but actually they're where the market migrates to. And each of those locations has some constituent facts or features. By definition, they have a world-class venue of scale. Not just a shed, not just a space, but a world-class venue that works, that is modular, that has got integrated technology that allows you to put tracking technology and analytic technology around, allows exhibitors to display their increasingly technology-based products and services. They have airport capacity and they have connections, and we know that because we actually have a trade show that does that, World Roots. They have a world-class airline, or more than one world-class airline, both with routes and with service and with capacity for expansion. They have a scale and range of hotel capacity. If you're going to run a major brand in a market with 100,000 visitors at the event, that might be 150,000 visitors around that event because you've got all the people who do build, who do design, who do construction, who do security. So you need a range of hotel capacity to go from two-star to five-star in order to be able to handle that. That narrows the number of cities that tick that box. You need city transport infrastructure, because if you drop 100,000 people in a city, even a city the size of London, that has an effect. And you need to be able to move those people around, because these are business tourism travelers who are looking to be efficient in the distribution of their time. They're not languorously wandering around the city enjoying the sights, or most of them aren't. And it helps a bit if you have some distinctive city or location branding or identity. And as you go around the world, you go to Dubai or Vegas or Austin or Riyadh or Bangkok or Sydney or Paris, you see cities doing that. creating brands that attract travelers, industries, communities, and B2B brands like ours in order to build the presence of a city and a location in a particular market. Today, there's about six million square meters of capacity in and around that community of Gateway City, so described. And in the time period of our One Informer program, we think that'll step up to around eight million square meters, and we can fill that. So you've got customer demand, and you've got supply-side delivery, and you've got the ability to add more services, and you've got the tailwind of the other structural growth elements in the market. Today, we're delighted to announce another partnership. I often say that partnerships are a bit of an informal superpower. We have a number of partnerships around the world with trade associations, in our academic business, but also in our B2B business with cities, with governments, with city-states, with locations. And today we're delighted to announce a partnership with the city of Dubai, specifically with the Dubai World Trade Center, which if you know this business at all, you will know that's a powerhouse venue location in this industry. They are a venue operator and a brand owner and operator, and we'll be combining their business with our business. to create a platform called Informa International to further accelerate growth, brand extension, brand syndication, and innovation in those growth categories. Their business and our business in those markets is currently growing at about 20% plus a year. Do that over three years. This will be a billion-dollar business in three years in the time of one Informa, 25 to 2028. The categories today are as listed, healthcare, energy, aviation, food, enterprise tech, human resources, We're really thrilled about this. We know our partners well. We've been in deep partnership with them for many years. They were one of the first people whom I met many years back. We've worked with them. They've worked with us. The complementarity, I think, will be very, very clear. And we intend to bring this to market as an operating entity in 2026. So what's our outlook for 2025? We're confident in our guidance, 5% consistent group underlying growth. That obviously is a mix. We see our academic business hitting 4%. We see our B2B business, 7% plus. And we'll talk in detail about the Informatech target business when we do the results. But the numbers are as per current guidance. On earnings, we're comfortable with where consensus is on earnings growth. We're seeing another year of double-digit earnings growth, so that will see a step up. I think the earnings range is between 56 and 58 pence of earnings. We've done 50 pence this year. So we're confident that we can sit behind that. We'll see further growth, therefore, in our dividends. We're resuming our share buybacks, and we'll delever the business down to well within our capital allocation range. So you see our capital allocation framework on the right-hand side, which we put to the market a couple of years ago, and we reiterate the value of that mix of reinvestment, dividends, buybacks, and a comfortable balance sheet strength. One Informa, for the colleagues in the room who are from Informa, and hopefully the colleagues on the live stream from Informa, this should not be news. This was the theme of our leadership summit at the beginning of the year. It's the drumbeat within the company. We've built a great business. We've built a great brand platform. We've built a great geographic position. And our intention now is to maximize the benefits of that in marketing, in data, in analytics, in customer engagement, in enterprise support, and therefore in performance. Alex Roth, our Director of Strategy, has taken on the role of Director of Operational Transformation, working with our technology and marketing teams, and to step up our delivery of these benefits on a brand-by-brand, market-by-market, category-by-category basis. So this will be the operational fuel for the performance growth that we're talking about financially today. AI. AI. AI no self-respecting chief executive or certainly not one that wants to keep her or his job can do a results presentation without talking about AI as I said earlier for us AI is a boon it's not a burden Like every knowledge business, I think this will allow us to take all of our key knowledge functions, marketing, analysts, editors, researchers, journalists, producers, exhibition directors, financial analysts, financial controllers, and look at the workflows and work out what can we automate, what can we add more value to. That's the question. What can you automate, what can you add more value to? We've had a chance to look inside the window of the LLM world because we've done some deals with all the key LLM players. And so what we've done over the last year or so, as well as increasingly using NLP and machine learning and system capability in our day-to-day basis, is we've created our own version of an AI support agent to deploy in the company more widely, whose name is Alicia. And we'll be launching Alicia on a company-wide basis on the 8th of April, I think. And the intention really is to essentially allow all colleagues within Informa to have all the benefits of AI speed of analytics, answers, summaries, capabilities in any language but with the added benefit of having unique access to the proprietary data and information that only we have. All our documents, all our financials, all our information, all our data. And we've done that also for security reasons so that we don't have 16,000, 17,000 colleagues popping that into ChatGPT every Tuesday. It stays within our own perimeter. So it's currently in beta test, and so I thought the acid test of a beta test is to do it live at a presentation. So we're going to do it live at a presentation. And my colleague, Nick Corner, who is sitting in the corner, is going to be my beautiful assistant. Are you good with that, Nick? Of course. So what I'm going to try and do is just give you a little sense. There's nothing new here. Hands up who's a regular ChatGBT or Copilot user. Pretty good. My advice, if you're not, become one. I now live on it. Much to my colleagues and all my advisors' horror. Because every answer I get, I cross-reference it across three AI agents to see whether it's accurate. So we're going to see whether this works. So we're going to ask only three questions, but bear with me. Hopefully this will be revealing. So, you ready, Nick? You go. Okay, so here's my first question. Alicia... Who is going to ask the first question at Informa's 2024 full-year results presentation that we're holding here today? Nick Dempson. Nick Dempson. For those who can't see this or are on the live stream, the answer is from Alicia. Nick Dempsey from Barker will ask the first question for the audience today. He will, in fact, ask three questions, as always, and the second will be the most difficult, so prepare yourself. Okay, it seems to be working. So, second question. Alicia, after such an outstanding year in 2024, after such an outstanding year in 2024, will the market reward Informa for its performance? So what does she say? You should know well that past performance is no guarantee of future performance, and so the market will be skeptical, as always, and Informa will have to outperform again to really see the benefit. Well, who can argue with that? Okay, third and final question. No, penultimate question. Okay, Alicia, how will... Just so you know, those first two questions were scripted. I hope you'll forgive me, Nick. And don't make it three tricky questions. So this is the real life question. So let's see where this goes. How will AI enhance B2B events? personalized event experiences, better analytics, enhanced networking, automated content creation and marketing, dynamic speaker matching, real time data analytics and insights, virtual event assistance, automated post event summarization, enhanced product demonstrations, predictive analytics for event planning, content personalization, automated language translation, sentiment analysis, However, it's important to note that while AI offers numerous benefits, it should be used to enhance human creativity and decision-making. The most successful B2B events will likely be those that strike a balance between AI-driven efficiency and the irreplaceable human touch in event management and networking. I couldn't have written it better myself, and I promise you I didn't. Okay, last question to give a bit of thought provocation. What can AI not replace at B2B events? Human connections and networking, genuine interpersonal relationships, creative problem-solving, storytelling, inspirational speaking, strategic decision-making, complex negotiations, cultural sensitivity and etiquette, empathy, emotional support, creativity in event design, impromptu problem-solving, authentic leadership presence, contextual interpretation of data, quite critical there, relationship-based sales, very important in enterprise businesses, mentorship and knowledge transfer, In conclusion, whilst AI will undoubtedly transform many aspects of B2B events, the human touch remains irreplaceable in creating meaningful, impactful, and memorable experiences that drive business relationships forward. We're done, Nick. Can I go back to my presentation? Thank you very much. In summary, where are we? First of all, we feel that the company's at a point whereby there's been a lot of changes in the last couple of years. So one of the things we thought might be useful in 2025 is to open the company up a bit and to allow people who want to come in and get more of a hands-on touch and feel of what we do and how we do it and where the benefits are, not just what Alicia tells you. So we're going to run four open events, invitation events for investors in 2025. We're going to do a full capital markets day in Dubai in November alongside the Dubai Air Show. By then, Informer International will be pretty much fully baked and we'll be ready to go live on that so you'll be able to get a sense of what that is. There are only 50 places, and they'll be allocated on a first-come, most-liked basis. No, I'm joking. They'll be allocated on a... first-come basis. So for those of you who are interested, please do email and let us know whether that works for you. Those are the dates. But alongside that, we're going to do three field trips through the year, kind of smaller events, not so much razzmatazz. One at Super Return, which many of you might know, our private capital event, which is in Berlin. Fantastic event, really fantastic event. But we can only allocate 20 spaces because it's already sold out. So it'll be 20 spaces, again, first-come, first-served basis. Canned lime, which many of you might know, for those of you who followed Essential, this will be our first can. And we're already doing some interesting things there. And there we're going to be 35 spaces. And then food ingredients at the back end of the year in Paris, in France. It's one of our really... It's a great show, and it's a fantastic place to be. But again... It's a super popular event, so we're allocating 20 spaces. So choose which works. You're welcome to come to all four, but please max out on the capital markets days for those who want to get more specificity. So in summary, this is where we are as we go into 25. We've really come off a fantastic year for the company in 2024 across all of the businesses. Taylor & Francis, I think, is going into 25, not just with a reset in leadership, but with a reset in possibility, underpinned by some cash flows for investment in some critical areas, and probably will be, in practical terms, a lead horse as a knowledge business for how you can use AI to improve access for customers, productivity for authors, and speed of knowledge sharing. Informa Tech Target is an exciting opportunity for us to develop it in adjacency. The combination is going extremely well. We opened for business at the beginning of the year. The business is tracking to the plan that we've laid out, and we'll take the market through that in detail when we do the formal results for Informa Tech Target. Our B2B business is a thing of beauty. We've built this thing with care, with attention, with a couple of bumps along the way, not least a big bump called COVID. We came out of the other side of that with real wind in our sails and ambition to take the market. If you go back to my market, $30 billion, we've got about 10% of that market. which means we've got plenty of runway ahead. So there's real opportunity for growth. We feel confident about what we do, how we do it, where we do it, who we've chosen to partner with, and what more we can do with it. So that's where we are. Those are our results for 24, a sense of where we're taking the company and why it is what it is. And now Gareth and I will happily take any and all questions. And I thought we might start with Nick. Nick.

It's just coming, Nick.

Good morning. Nick Dempsey from Barclays. So first one, you haven't been specific on adjusted operating profit guidance, which you were, I think, the last couple of years. I guess that makes investors a little bit nervous. Can we assume that you at least won't see margins go backwards in 25 versus 24? Second question, data offerings to enhance revenue per exhibitor at exhibitions – Can you give us an example of how that is working and where we go with that next, just so we can get under the skin of that a bit more? And the third question, in terms of forward bookings that you've seen from January and February shows into 26, are we still seeing some positive momentum there? I'm not asking for 26 guidance, but just about the momentum.