Informa plc

okay we'll get started shall we well very nice to see everybody thanks very much for those who've joined in person thanks for finding the time I know this is a busy time of year for half year results presentations and for the few hundred people we've got on the webcast I'm going to try and stay glued to this podium not because I'm feeling nervous but because I've been told it's easier for my friend the camera man at the back there so let's see Is this working? Yeah. Back one, back one, back one, back one. Okay, so welcome to our half-year results. It's that time of year, 2025. We're halfway through the year, a bit past halfway through the year. A good number of you may well have seen a release, so I'll try and make this reasonably quick and to the point, and then we can get to Q&A. Here's a simple summary. The way I think to look at this is the top line numbers tell you some slightly different things than the bottom line numbers. So the top line numbers give you a sense of our reported performance in revenue, in profit, in earnings, in cash. So therefore, looking at the absolute company, how have we done in the first six months? And obviously that includes the businesses that we added to the portfolio last year. And what do the headlines say beyond the obvious, which is growth, growth, growth, and growth? is that the businesses that were added to the company have generally landed well, the brands that came into the portfolio have generally landed well, and that the underlying growth in the overall group is strong. Below that, you see the more like-for-like sales comparisons, underlying revenue growth. And on like-for-like sales, you see us delivering 8% growth in revenue, slightly better in our profits, We've confirmed the first payment, the interim payment for the 25 dividend in line with our profit growth. And you see our debt, which went up a bit last year because of the acquisitions we did, come down to about two and a half times. So touching the range. So I would say on any measure, and clearly I'm biased, I'm selling my own book here, or our own book, these are very good numbers. And They're very good numbers on good numbers. I think I'm correctly saying this is pretty close to our 18th quarter of consecutive growth since the depths of COVID. And that speaks, I think, to the fundamental strengths in the portfolio and in the business. And on that point, that's really where I thought I'd start today, which is to come out of informal and just look at the markets in which we work in, the categories that we're in. Specialist knowledge and live events. Both of those categories are demonstrating some fundamental strengths from which we are benefiting. We are benefiting on top of that, which you can see in our performance numbers, I think because of our geographic spread, because of our brands, because of the categories and the subject areas we've chosen. So there are some conscious choices which are allowing us to over-deliver on performance, but the neighbourhoods that we've chosen to operate in, live and specialist knowledge, really are very strong. In a world of super computing capability, data analytics and increasing artificial intelligence and artificial capability intelligence, specialist information, verified specialist information, authentic specialist information is becoming more valuable, not less valuable. Similarly, in a world of remote working, growing populations, much travel, digitization, workplace technology live is becoming more valuable, whether it's in music or in sports or indeed in B2B events. I was looking for a comp, and the best comp I could find was the COP events, for those of you who follow the journey of the world on coming to agreements, intergovernmental agreements, that will make for a better world that we all live in today and hopefully tomorrow. The first COP was in Berlin. And the attendance of the first cult, which I think was in 1998, were 4,000 attendees. The last cult was in Dubai, where the attendees were 120,000. The growth of live events, whether it's commercial events, consumer events, intergovernmental events, has been exponential over the period. And we are seeing that in our portfolio. And it's one of the reasons why we chose to invest a significant amount of our capital and shareholders' capital in those two markets. How does that look in absolute numbers in the first half of the year, our group underlying revenues just below 8%, our B2B events business just over 8% and actually our academic business touching 12% combination of an underlying growth in the fundamental longstanding business and the kind of reasonably predictable drumbeat of data licensing agreements which in and of themselves individually don't necessarily recur and repeat, but we're now in, I think, our third year of finding them in the year, but they're non-individually recurring. The right-hand side of the slide gives you a sense of the shape of the company, the scale of informal markets, the specialisms that are Connect and festivals and what that means for the scale of our B2B event portfolio. the size of Taylor & Francis, the academic business proportionally, and then the arrival of TechTarget into the portfolio. Two things to pick out on this slide, slide five. In addition to the absolute numbers, you will see, therefore, that we have upped our guidance for the year from 5% growth to 6% plus minus growth. That's partly on the back of what we've delivered already in the first half of the year. It's also partly on the back of what we can see with confidence in forward visibility. Secondly, we've increased the buyback. We've been running a share buyback program since the beginning of the year. We're going to repeat that into the back end of the year with another $150 million of our excess capital applied to buy back our shares through to the year end 2025. and then finally the confirmation of the dividend. How are the brands doing inside the portfolio? The market, as we've said before, is migrating towards scale. The major brand, the signature brand, the primary brand doesn't necessarily need to be the number one brand, as in the single biggest, although size does help. We think of brands in categories, marquee brands, power brands, and the growth rates in those larger brands, those more signature brands, is generally higher. And now you don't, very few brands get born at that scale. So you have to kind of start somewhere and then grow into it. And we have some examples of that. But across that scale side of our B2B portfolio, you really are seeing hyper growth, double digit growth and beyond in some instances. Geographically, In most locations, we're growing comfortably ahead of GDP growth rates. And in some locations, we really are doing extremely strongly, of which probably the most notable for us has been EMEA, which for those of us who've been around the company for a longer time, is really where the story of our adventure in the B2B event trade show market really started. That was where the kernel of Informus historical trade show business came from. I think we're on track I think I'm correct in saying that we're pretty close to being on track next year if the joint venture that we are currently piecing together with our partners at DWTC in Dubai UAE comes together in that region we may end up with more revenue out of that region than we had as a company when I joined the board of Informa it really has proven to be a powerhouse market both for the world and also for our own our own business. So the geographic spread has really helped us. We've become an international business. America is by far and away our largest market, or the Americas geographically is by far and away our largest market. EMEA I've touched on. Europe remains strong, large brands. ASEAN, smaller market but very high growth and very dynamic markets. And some countries and locations within there which are growing extremely strongly. Hong Kong we look at differently from mainland China for obvious reasons. And the Chinese market, whilst we would say it's below our tracking average growth rate, it's still circa 5% growth, which will serve our overall performance very well. Coming out of geographies and into categories, our category choices are serving as well. Healthcare, food, pharma and finance being the kind of example high performers are. but others too, and we are doubling down on these markets. In most of them, we have significant market access, relationships with key customers, our data is strong, our understanding of the market trends, and therefore our ability to be able to shape and create products that serve that market is doing well. So what's allowing us to build growth on top of simple GDP growth? is a mixture of things. We are pricing for value much more forensically than we used to. We're focusing on improving our market penetration, absolute share of activity by sector, by industry, by customer grouping. We're very focused on using our geographic spread to expand, syndicate, distribute, and further extend our larger brands into multiple markets. In a good number of markets, the supply coming on and that increase of supply in most of those locations, we can fill. Now, not all square meters are born equal. There's a range, a price range, depending upon where you are in the world and indeed where you are at a very prosodic level in the hall or in the show. But nevertheless, that net is a capacity gain for the overall market. And in the major markets, high-growth cities like Dubai, Riyadh, Bangkok, and Jakarta, we have a high degree of confidence that more capacity is just more sales, as opposed to more capacity ends up diluting your pricing capability. We're experimenting on attendee value, as well as exhibitor value. Traditionally in trade shows, the revenues came from exhibitors rather than from attendees, so we're experimenting on that, actually with quite some success around Straightforward attendee pricing, hosted buyers, specialist content, some product specification for some customers, major exhibitors. And then on top of that, you've got additional services. You can wrap around the activity, whether that be straightforward product directories or some slightly more sophisticated content marketing or lead gen work. Each of those allows us to build value into the proposition for our captured participating customers. In academic, as I said, the underlying growth there tracking to 3-4%, so in line with our guidance. The absolute performance is stronger, function of that consistent underlying growth and the recurring at a generic level data licensing agreements, but not necessarily at a specific level. Our renewals in the subscription business have remained remarkably strong. They've become more individualistic. We have many now, dozens of individual transition agreements. Some of them are still straightforward, pay-to-read. Some of them are hybrid. Some of them are a complete mix. Some of them are very bespoke. But nevertheless, the role of that as a provision and service mechanism within that market remains. Alongside that, the open research business is growing at pace, both in absolute submissions in and in number of dedicated open journals or hybrid journals and in the value that you can deliver to your researcher audience. And then on top of that, you have the data licensing agreements. We're targeting increased growth in line with our guidance through to the end of the year. We see confidence in our forward bookings on open research, and we see continuing demand for further licensing arrangements. On forward visibility and predictability, this is an area where we've really tried to focus the business on what you might call quality of revenue. What can we see? What can we predict? What can we recur? And we have high confidence and high visibility through to the end of 2025 and indeed into 2026. And comparatively, if you look at that level of visibility and level of revenue quality, 25 on 24 or 24 on 23, it's again progressively improving. And that, I think, speaks to the stability in the market as well as the value of the market. Come inside the company a little bit. We've been very focused. We did a few acquisitions when we came out of COVID, take advantage of the fact that we had some available funds because of the transaction we did with Informer Intelligence to further scale our position in B2B. Since then, we've been focused on integration, execution, development, and improving some of the foundation projects operational foundation layers with Inside Informa. And this is a program being led by my colleague, Alex Roth, working in conjunction with Joel Dugan, who runs our marketing, and Jeremy Davis, who runs our technology operations, and Ian Branch, who runs our service delivery for our customers. In all of those areas, in marketing, in technology, and in service support, there is, we would say, consciously, there is room for improvement. And actually, that's not a bad thing. We'd rather it was perfect today. But the advantage of having room for improvement is it can get better for our customers. And as it gets better for our customers, we can be more effective. We can deliver better services. We can make the event experience more freshenless. And that will enable us to be an overall higher quality experience provider. a superior performer, and have a unique platform which only we and we alone can benefit from. The balance sheet's in good repair. We're concentrating on our capital allocation in a pretty rigorous way. We've done a progressively good job, or Gareth and the team have done a progressively good job on absolute free cash flow, cash conversion, and then what do we do with that cash? We have a progressive dividend policy. You see that again demonstrated today. We have available funds for inorganic investment, although that's not been a priority for 25. We have added share buybacks as a recurring part of our capital allocation policy. alongside dividends, and that, I think, has served us very well. If you look at the effective average buying rate of our shares over the last six months, it's really been very efficient, and that's part of the reason why we've committed a further £150 million to this year's buyback programme. Our debt structure is very comfortable and competitively priced, and we are now back within the range of our targeted leverage. So we feel good about where the company is from a financial perspective. This is the group as it is, the B2B events business, markets, the scale trade show and international business connect, our content rich business and festivals, our experience led business, our newest business and having its kind of first full year in the sun. Our second biggest business, academic markets, fundamentally strong, has made the transition to being a significant player in open, is focusing on developing further capability in the corporate market and is experimenting in the embedded value in our data, in our content data, and what that means in a world of AI. And then our newest business, Informa Tech Target, in a formation year, the foundation year, there's work going on in that business, a lot of work going on in that business, to create a single entity, to have a go-to-market structure that enables to take the three, four, five product service offerings for enterprise technology customers to market in an efficient way. That's meaning some product configuration, some technology configuration, and some work on customer service delivery. We're ahead of our target on cost synergy. We're behind our target on our revenue delivery. For the former, we feel good. For the latter, some of that is the external market. Some of that, I think, is some distraction around the creation of the company. Some of that is some technical issues. But all of that gives us confidence that there's an opportunity for us to see that level out at the back end of 25 and get back into growth in 26. So as we look into 26, we see a strong position for the group as a whole. We've tried to invite more people inside the company and in particular the B2B business in 2025 by opening up capital market events or shareholder engagement. We've done two already. We had a good number of people who attended Super Return and then a larger number of people who attended CanLion in June. The next one off the calendar is the Dubai Airshow where we will actually formally run a capital market stay where those who attend, I think we've got about 40, 45 plus registrations. If anyone is interested, please, who hasn't registered, please do. The actual event itself, the Dubai Airshow, is a really outstanding showcase. It is the most significant commercial transaction airshow in the calendar portfolio. It's a great time of year to be in that part of the world. We have a major market presence in that part of the world, and we'll be really very significantly further down the path in our partnership joint venture with the city of Dubai. And so it'll be a good time. to join us at the Dubai Airshow, and then to see out the year. Who doesn't want to be in Paris for some Christmas shopping in December? And along the way, you can come to our fantastic food show. So hopefully that's allowing more people to get a sense of actually what we do, how we do, and what it means for very different end markets. Private capital, global creativity, advertising and media, aviation, and food and food ingredients. These are all very, very different markets, specialist markets. And if you've had a chance to see all four of them, you get a very clear sense of why we believe the fundamental category truth of where the Informa company is operating is strong. Live events and specialist knowledge. These are very powerful places to be. We have built a very strong geographic and sectoral position and we're really pleased with the way the company has performed to date. We'll now throw it open to questions. I think there are mics.

Thanks for the presentation, Will Howard from Berenberg. Just firstly on Taylor and Francis, obviously you reported sort of good visibility into 26 and renewal cycles for subscription. But what are you hearing in terms of any changes in behavior? Obviously you spoke about those transformative agreements, but a little bit more detail would be helpful there. Yeah. And then just into the B2B events division, just if you could share some colour on the margin for the remainder of the year. I think ConsenSys has got sort of 27.5% for that division. And obviously you've delivered 30% in H1. So just a little bit more colour there would be helpful.

Sorry. I don't want to be a poor person's politician to answer your question with a question. But when you say change of circumstance on your first question, what exactly are you – I'm referring to the NIH cuts.