Informa plc

Okay, I think we're ready. Are we live yet? We are. Okay, good morning everybody. Very nice to see everybody in the room. It's good to see there's a future in live events. And we've got a good few hundred people on the live stream. So to people on the live stream, thank you very much for joining. This morning we're going to very, at a click, I'm going to take you through the 25 results and also some observations on where the company is and more importantly where the company is going. And then we're going to get to Q&A and Gareth and I will try and answer questions both in the room and on the live stream. So 2025, a little bit of context. You don't need me to tell you that the macro is at the moment I think the easiest word to use to describe it is it's volatile. Not everywhere, but overall it certainly is. AI acceleration and the impact of AI is the subject of much debate in many locations, many industries, particularly in industries like ours where knowledge and information are being packaged and presented in ever more increasingly different ways and at a higher pace rate and speed and accuracy. Actually a big advantage for us, but nevertheless there are questions around that. We'll come to that. There's regional conflict, obviously most topically at the moment in the Middle East, but actually more broadly in other places, not least Europe, and indeed other parts of the world. Some of those things are changing trade patterns, and trade patterns are very material for our business. Actually, oftentimes the movements in trade patterns are an advantage for us because that speaks to supply chain rebalancing or security or increasing resilience or redundancy requirements, which actually suits our business perversely. Energy prices clearly are in flux and are flexing upwards at the moment at some pace and rate. I'm not a macroeconomist, but that probably means that the cost of money isn't likely to go down anytime soon. Maybe unlikely to go up, but it's not going to go down anytime soon. And you're seeing maybe the obvious proxy for that is what's it showing in hard commodities like gold and silver prices. So there's a lot going on in the macro. But as I often say, one of the many strengths of the informal business is we don't really operate in the macro. We're not immune to it by definition, but we're a lot more isolated from it than public markets, equity markets often fully appreciate. The clues in our mission statement, we champion specialism. That's what we do. We operate in many niche micro markets in many different locations. And that combination of specialism and diversification really gives us a significant resilience when the macro is volatile. And if there was a basket for equities that had those features, we would firmly be in that basket. We're in two markets, live events and specialist knowledge. Live events have never been stronger. The power of physicality, face-to-face, originality, uniqueness, content you can't get elsewhere, whether it's in sport, whether it's in entertainment, whether it's in music, or whether it's in B2B conventions, trade shows, conferences or confexes, is really very strong. The power of face-to-face keeps indexing upwards, And also the number of categories keeps atomizing over time because industries become increasingly more specialist and supply chains and communities therefore subdivide and recreate and that provides us with new product opportunities. Supply chain access, I touched on that. First party data, really knowing who your customers are, who your buyers are, who your sellers are, who your distributors are, and managing that proprietary data in a way that gives you the ability to provide hyper-targeting capability to your buyers and your sellers. That's unique to what we do. Live human experiences are difficult to replicate. Robots are great, but hanging out with them is a little one-dimensional. And remote working is producing a reality that more and more people actually, in their industrial life, in their professional life, when they have an opportunity to gather and communicate, they not only want it, it's become an essential. For us, there's a time dividend associated with AI. We haven't set ourselves a target. I haven't set a target inside the company of how many roles, how many jobs, how many positions can we remove or release as a function of AI. But we definitely have set ourselves an ambition to release time from process and drudgery into creativity and impact. And in our business, we monetize creativity, content, and impact. And that really is valuable. Specialist knowledge. 2026 is not a good time to be a generalist. 2030 will be a terrible time to be a generalist. The world has gone to specialism. You're an expert in something, a function, an industry, a category, an activity. And our academic business pivots around specialization. Subject, matter, specialization. Validated, verified, independent, trusted, and then served up to customers in a digital format that's easily accessible and easily usable. And the pace of innovation around thought and content never ceases to slow down. So there is structural growth in both of the end markets that we've chosen to face off against. And we've been doing this for some time now. I still remember when we first produced this slide, Richard saying to me, I'm not sure anyone's really going to know what the knowledge and information economy is and isn't championing the specialist a little dry. And both of those things may be true, but it has served our business and our shareholders extremely well over many quarters and many years. In our B2B business, we've achieved market leadership in our narrow market. And in our academic business, we've more than doubled the size of that business. We've more than quadrupled the size of our open access business. And our international reach in that business by both subject area and by geography gives us a very, very strong market position. So we feel good about where we were. 2025 was a remarkable year for the company. I observed to somebody this morning that in 2025 we nearly produced as much profit as the business as we did revenue the first year I was doing this job. This business is unrecognizable from where it was 10, 11 years ago. We did double-digit reported growth. We did high single-digit, nearly 10% growth in our B2B live markets business. We managed rightly to see our profits grow higher than our revenues. We're delivering another year of double-digit increase in the dividend. And we brought our leverage down and we increased our margin. And as you know, because many of you here and on the live stream follow and track every single one of those metrics and a few others just to keep us on our toes. What we're trying to do is build a sustainably successful business, not a moment in time successful business, but a sustainably successful business. What is the business? This is in simple form. 75% of the business is now our B2B live events business. Put that in numbers, £4 billion of revenue, $5 billion. When we started out in this, that business was $100 million of revenue. It's unrecognizable from where it was 12 years ago. We are the market leader in that business by some margin. In every city, in every country that we trade in, bar one, we are unquestionably the market leader. That gives us massive opportunity for access, for partnership, for new product launch, and indeed the ability to attract and retain the best talent in what it is that we do. Our academic business has gone from strength to strength, but proportionally has got smaller in the group, but it's much larger than it was in its category. It really is doing what it should do well and compellingly and growing its subject area coverage as well as the way in which we serve the product and the services up to our customers. Geographically, the UK is now 5% and declining as a percentage of our business. We are a completely international business. 50% of the business is in the Americas, 20% is in Asia, 14% is in India, the Middle East and Africa, and 16% is in Europe. And I always say in Europe is actually the one place in the world where our business is not domestic. In the other geographies, really, they're very domestic businesses. Whereas in Europe, what we're really doing there is trading brands which are located in Europe because Europe provides the location for international communities to meet. In one sense, it's pure play business-to-business tourism. Our live B2B events business grew at nearly 10% last year. Like for like. Our academic business did a very respectable 3.6% growth. And our digital services business had a tough first year, which we are setting about repairing. In live events, there's real structural growth. Lots of reasons for that. I'm just going to deal with the right-hand side of the slide. The primary reason for it is that MICE, which is one of the least attractive acronyms that we deal with, is a significant economic strategy for many locations, many countries, many cities, many states, as a way of driving both activity and a market position internationally in an industry or in a sector. And large-scale conventions are a front end of that business. People often say exhibitions is a lag indicator. That's actually true. But if you're building an economic position as a country or a location, it's actually a lead contributor. And as a lead contributor, we can be a very powerful part of that. Specialization I've talked about, supply chain I've talked about, the rising value of face-to-face I've talked about. The other point is that business travel which is a cost and indeed a cost that's gone up in the last two to three years post COVID is also one that's consolidating around must do rather than nice to do. And we had a very weather eye on that when we built the portfolio that we now own and operate. I'll come back to that in a second. It's about a $30 billion end market. It's an international business, but it's delivered nationally. It's got very long-term structural growth dynamics. About 50% of that business is owned by trade associations or countries. The other 50% is private. Of that, the top 10 independent operators, of which we are one, constitute about a fifth of that. So my point, there's runway for growth in that market. So you've got structural growth and market share opportunity. And it is also a highly entrepreneurial business. So you can refresh the portfolio by targeted acquisition. And we no longer need to buy platform businesses. We have platform capability and geographical coverage wherever we need to operate. What happened last year, roughly the industry grew at about 7%. We now have about 800 brands in our portfolio, many of them absolutely world-class. If you look at the top 100 brands in this market, we are by far and away the biggest company by representation. Our top 50 brands, which I'll come on to, represent about $2 billion plus of our revenue. Ten of those brands deliver over $50 million of revenue. We've got 20 brand extensions and new launches planned for experiment and launch in 2026. We're looking at volume growth, price growth, yield growth, product growth and service growth. And we are targeting a minimum of 5% plus growth in every region in which we operate. I'm here, I'm going to come on and talk about in a second. These are the top 50 brands by name and you can kind of work out the category. This portfolio alone, because the growth rates here are higher, the margins are higher, the pre-booking is higher, the re-booking is higher. If you could buy this as a standalone business, it'd be worth more than our company is today. These are uniquely valuable assets. in many instances, have existed in their market for 10, 20, 30, 40, in one case over 100 years. They've built a reputation, a calendar slot, a location value, an industry recognition. Very, very hard to dislodge and very, very capable of being internationalized, syndicated, and expanded. To get to the question of the moment, of those 50 brands, those are the brands that trade in India, the Middle East and Africa and specifically in the affected markets by the current disruption. Of those, three of them have already traded. And they traded extremely well at the beginning of the year. WHX, WHX Labs, and Gulf Food. World-class, world-scale leading events in their industries, fully traded and fully rebooked for 2027. Of the remaining brands that are left to trade, Leap, It's still currently scheduled to trade at the beginning of April, but we have already optioned and secured a capability to run it later in the year if that decision makes sense, and we'll make that decision in partnership with our partners and the authorities in the market in the next week to two weeks. Every single one of the remaining events we have rescheduled and secured capacity for the remainder of the year. So we have nothing that's trading in the near term in the market other than that that has already traded. of the major brands. That's the kind of summary of where we are in that market. Beyond that, we'll get to it, I'm sure, in questions. More broadly, what's driving the growth of the business? This is the stairway to heaven that we talked about at our Capital Markets Day, and this is what we are focused on in our live events business. Pricing for value, driving yield, driving mix, pricing above inflation, and delivering high value for our customers. Growing market penetration, what percentage of the companies in every end market are represented, are participating and how do we maximize that? What are the network effects of scale and how do we develop internationally? Geo-expansion, taking our brands from one market to another market. Brand expansion, brand syndication, doing partnership with global cities and driving growth through partnership. The market is growing through supply. There is new capacity coming to the market. And in most cases, there is demand for that capacity. And the expansion is coming in global gateway cities, not in places that people don't want to go. Attendee value. Historically, you will know that the trade show business was funded entirely through revenue driven by exhibitors. How do you drive value and return from those people who attend, from the buyers, the attendees, the other participants? And then finally, how do you wrap more services around the event to amplify the value of the products or the service? Each one of those six categories is where we are focusing brand by brand, category by category to drive growth in the live events business. In academic markets, our target here is to get this business to 4% growth this year. Last year, we did just under that at 3.6%. We started the year very strongly. Our subscriptions are running ahead year on year on a renewal basis and on a quality and on a cash flow basis. We're targeting a 20% growth in research submissions on the open side of the business, both in volume and also in source and in subject. We're seeing additional sources of revenue in licensing and in archives. And we're also targeting some sectors where candidly we're materially underrepresented, such as corporate R&D and corporate publishing. Penny laid this out. How do you get the business from where it was to our underlying ambition, which is to be above our 5% base rate for any business in the portfolio? We think the market dynamics are strong, more people in secondary, tertiary and further education, more subject specialization, more investment in R&D, more investment in original research. Open research continues to grow and expand both in absolute terms and in those locations that are providing input submissions. We've got depth in all customer segments, not just historically where we were focused, which was in the education market. Not that we are deserting that market, but we're seeing growth in all customer segments. It's internationalizing. We're making this presentation for the United Kingdom, which has a long history and a strong position in education. But if you look at the locations of the world that are building and investing in new institutions, new universities, new research, actually that's happening in other places in the world, much like we've seen in our B2B business. And then the development of intelligent technology. We're looking to improve our workflow and our own existing platforms and indeed develop new ones. So we feel confident that over time, within the time of the plan, through to 28, 29, we can get this to being a 5% plus growth businesses. B2B Digital Services, our newest business, connecting buyers and sellers digitally rather than physically, had its first year last year. It'd be fair to say it hasn't been the most successful debut ever reported. There's a whole host of reasons for that. We can talk about what those may be, but the key point is that was then, this is now. Our objective is very simple in 2026. We're going to get this business back into growth. You can't have a business if you're running a growth business or a portfolio of growth businesses where one of them is going backwards. We're very focused on where that growth has come from. Our view is it comes from major customers in major markets in North America in enterprise technology. That's a big market. We are, in this very narrow market, the largest player by some margin. We have the best product portfolio. We have the most diverse product portfolio, possibly too diverse. We're rationalizing that a little bit. We're through the heavy lifting of the combination, and I've got a good confidence that when we're reporting this this time next year, it'll be joining the growth club. Will it be north of 5%? We'll debate, but we can see where this business can go. AI, subject to the moment. We started really to build the foundation blocks for AI during COVID. At the point where the business was closing, we concluded that in order to come out of COVID, which of course we always knew we would, to come out of COVID, we would have to be much more disciplined in the way in which we collected and collated data. Our data, our customers' data, their profile, what they did, who they are, where they visit, what they're interested in, where they spend their time, where they spend their dwell time, where they spend their search time. And so we invested right in the heart of COVID in building a proprietary data warehouse capability in IRIS. And then we've been building on that ever since in order to give us the unique input data to enable us as intelligent management of information and knowledge grows in capacity and artificial intelligence allows you in productivity, in product enhancement, in addressing your market more efficiently, and in product development, to bring products and services to market and to do what we do on a humdrum daily basis, more efficiently, more effectively, and more compellingly, both for our teams but also for our customers. There is nothing about this that we've been spooked by since the beginning. There's nothing about this that is worrying us. There's a lot about this that's giving us confidence that we can do more things more quickly, more effectively than was previously the case. It's worth noting on the right hand side of this chart that AI as a product is a big part of our portfolio today. Last year in 2025, we had 50 plus B2B life events in our portfolio focused solely on the enterprise technology market. We had 800,000 attendees who paid in some way, shape or form to come to our events, many of which were pivoted around the evolution and the developments in artificial intelligence. We have a material addressable end market. We've done a significant amount of work in product enhancement using AI capability, and we're using it ever more daily in enhancing productivity inside the company, in businesses, in brands, in functions, and in capabilities. The other way to cut into AI is what does it mean for us is what does it mean for your customers? What does it mean for the end markets? Are you facing into end markets that are going to be so disintermediated or diminished by the application of AI that it's going to mean they're less inclined to be buyers of your own products and services This is not our assessment, this is an independent assessment of the end markets which materially we serve and our amber green index gives you a sense of where we see the AI impacts being either green for go or amber for change. And that really speaks to the point I was making earlier about the brand portfolio that we've built in B2B live events. I say this often to shareholders and often to people that we are seeking to recruit. One of the advantages of having built the company in the last 10 to 12 years is we haven't ended up where we are by accident. We've made conscious choices about which markets do we serve by geography, by category, by end market, by market feature, by market size, by market potential. And by and large, we've made choices to operate and service end markets that have got the long-term structural features of growth. They're not immune. But generally speaking, we're not facing into end markets that look like they're going to have a significant disruption. And in many instances, end markets for which AI will be an enabler for further growth and therefore further investment in sales products and marketing activity, which is what our B2B live events largely service. The balance sheet is in good shape. We have one maturity this year on the debt side, which we are in the process of refinancing. We brought our leverage down. We'll do that again in 2026. We're maintaining a pretty constant level of 3% plus or minus capex investment in the business, which at $4 billion is about $120 to $130 million a year of compound investment. in capability. This is a light capital intensity business, but nevertheless, at those levels, if you do it for five years, six years, seven years, over time, you're building real capability into the business. We remain committed to the progressive dividend. You see that in today's announcement. We are investing in organically, but we've been out of the acquisition market now for over two years to focus on integration, development, and performance, and to prove quarter on quarter that we can do organic growth with the brands and the businesses we've got. We're in the share buyback market. Who wouldn't be at these prices? I'll repeat that. We're in the share buyback market. Who wouldn't be at these prices? We've just upped the amount of money that we're spending this year, which we'll review again in June, given the dislocation in the market. That's a very efficient use of our available cash and market position. So that's it in a nutshell. What are we doing? We're doing what we've said we've been doing for the last time. We're focusing on compounding our growth. Just keep doing that quarter on quarter, year on year. And if you're a shareholder, you see the value. If we can deliver our 5% plus growth, we can tick our margins up to 30%. We can generate north of a billion dollars of free cash flow. We can maintain a dividend. We can maintain a position in buybacks. We can maintain an investment in capital and technology and talent. And we can have some funds to do targeted acquisition on a very, very specific basis. There's a lot in this recipe that compounds growth for shareholders and participants in the market. If you do what I do for a living or try to do for a living, presenting these sorts of results is a real privilege. You don't knock these results out by producing pretty PowerPoint for days like this. You do it by thousands of people around the world working damn hard every day, every week, every month in many countries around the world, sometimes in challenging conditions. And right now we've got a few colleagues who are not actually in reality on the ground experiencing challenging conditions, but it's certainly a bit different than it was 10 days ago. We have a high degree of confidence that that situation, when it's resolved, will allow us to come back. Why do we have that confidence? Because we've seen that happen before. You take our product away from customers and then you bring it back. What you find is the customers come back in droves with enthusiasm and with purpose. So our rescheduling of what was planned to happen in April, May, June, into September, October, November, we feel confident will return, and that is part, alongside the overall growth of the company, which gives us confidence to restate our guidance to the market for 2026. Okay, let's go over to questions. Gosh, who would like to go first? Let's start. Who's handling the mics? Can we just in the front, in the second row just here, please?

Thank you very much. Anik Mas from Bernstein. It's great to see that you've been so proactive in the Middle East. My question is, what does these scheduling changes imply for costs? Do you need to give price discounts to your exhibitors to move them around? This is from your point of view, but I guess your clients need to be as flexible as you guys are. The second one is, is there any reason to believe or to think that the attendance of Middle East on shows is less local than in other geographies globally? And then, thirdly, I remember that Halal had like two main growth drivers for the Middle East and one of them was attracting share from other markets, basically. How are you thinking about this in the context of what's happening at the moment in the Middle East? Thank you.

Good questions. Everyone heard the questions. I mean, on cost, there are some fixed costs that we'll have to swallow, for sure, because we had some events that were kind of in flight. Nothing that I think is going to materially change our position, but it's a good observation. Discounting? No. Demands for rebates? No. Large-scale withdrawals and cancellations? No. Do we believe that we will see any material decline in attendance and participation? That's a question of timing. It's March. If by the time we get to September, October, we're still facing this level, not we, Informa, but the world is still facing this level of disruption in the affected locations, well, there'll be other questions that'll be being asked and answered. Do we think that's going to happen? No. What's our experience of when you close, re-phase and restart? Well, I remember during COVID when we were doing right in the heart of it, we were refinancing the company and someone asked the question, I think we were sitting on how much deferred income did we have on the balance sheet at the beginning of COVID?