Informa plc

Okay, are we live? We're live. Everyone feeling live? Good morning everybody and for those who are here today, thanks very much for joining in person. For those who are on the live stream, welcome to our half year results which we announced this morning and hopefully some people have had a chance to read it. I'm going to give a quick canter through an update and then try and use most of the time for questions if we could. Just to kind of step out, to step in, this is designed just to remind us why we're in the markets we're in. These are the two markets we operate in as a business, B2B live events and specialist knowledge. I just wanted to pick out two points on both as to why these are good markets with good macro conditions and forward runway. On live events, There's absolutely no doubt at all that specialist market categories are in growth. You'll see it later if you just stop and look at our portfolio. We're servicing at scale markets that 10, 15 years ago, when I started trying to do this for a living, didn't really exist as markets. And that methodization of market categories and extended supply chains provides us with significant forward growth potential. The other side, which maybe we didn't predict so much, but really is coming home to roost, is the power of life. and for those of us who did watch the World Cup with enthusiasm, live events in sport, in entertainment, in music and in business are having more and more traction, more and more value and more and more uniqueness. Lots of reasons for that, we can get into it, but there's absolutely no doubt that live is a great market to be in. On specialist knowledge, trust and trusted content, the more knowledge that's available, the more important finding trusted content is. and beyond trust, the thing that really matters is verification and authority. There's endless information supply. The question is which information are you going to pay attention to and which information comes with validation and authentication. If you're in both of those markets, we've chosen to hang out in some two pretty good neighborhoods. And so how good is the house? If we're in two good neighborhoods, how good is our house? Well, we think our house is pretty good. and I think you see it in our numbers today. If you wanted a single word to sum up our performance today, I would say it's a living demonstration of resilience. And there are many bricks in the wall that give us resilience as a business. We have a brand portfolio, which I'm going to come back to, which is certainly in the markets we're in pretty close to unique. we are genuinely an international business we operate at some version of reasonable scale in about 26 countries around the world and if you operate in the world you know there is volatility much discussion for understandable reasons about the volatility in the Middle East and in particular in how that impacts one country in the Middle East but there are many countries in the world and certainly in most years in which I've been doing this there's volatility somewhere in the world so breadth really matters If you're going to have a portfolio, try and have leading positions. That makes a big difference. It gives you a competitive advantage. And then most of all, the increasing importance of audience. We started out as a space business. We're migrating to becoming an audience business. And to be an audience business, you really need data. And our investment in data and understanding what our customers are doing, what our buyers are doing, what our sellers are doing, is really allowing us the opportunity to bring additional products and services to audiences. our customers many years back we wrote down after an intensive internal work exercise three words that we thought would summarize what it is we do champion the specialist it's not quite putting a man on the moon but nevertheless it sums up the essence of what we do and specialism is a fantastic set of markets to be in generalism is a bit out of fashion Specialism is highly in fashion. If you can be a mile deep rather than a mile wide, you can build moats and boundaries around what you do and that gives you both advantage and protection and that really has been a very strong north star for us over the period. This is the shape of the business that we now are. We are predominantly now a B2B business. That wasn't the case back in the day. We still have a very significant position in the academic markets business and a growing position in B2B digital services. Geographically, we are in absolute terms nearly 50% an America's business. I've just come back from spending a chunk of time in the Americas and the American economy right now is basically pretty strong. We've built our position in Asia, we've built our position in Europe, we've built our position in IMEA and as a net consequence our position in the United Kingdom is becoming an increasingly de minimis part of the group. Our market vertical position has expanded to my earlier point as markets have arrived or we've decided to go into different markets and I often say to potential investors in the company it's often worth looking not at the markets that we do serve but the markets that we don't serve because generally we've tried to focus on industry verticals that provide for us the fertile ground where we think we can be the best version of ourselves particularly in B2B large markets, international markets, high margin end markets very very extended supply chains, diversified supply and if you get that lined up That makes our product really very attractive. This is just a great slide if you do what we do for a living. There are only five brands on there that we owned when we started out on this journey as a company. If I went through each of those five, anti-aging today is 12x what it was back then. Super return today is 22x in revenue what it was back then. Monica Yotsho is 3x what it was back then. Middle East Energy is 2.5x what it was back then and the other 45 weren't brands that either existed in some cases or were ours in some cases. This is an absolutely world-class portfolio of brands, markets, categories and geographic positions and provides us with a real position both in the ability to retain and attract customers but also to retain and attract clients. Look here in the half year, you just take these brands that have run in the first half of the year, Canline which some of you were at, WHX which some of you were at, Natural Products Expo which some of you were at, Money 2020 in Europe which some of you were at, CPHI in China which I suspect few of you were at, London Tech Week actually which has been a lovely brand that we bought out of administration and turned into a real thing and Super Return which literally lived up to its name. It was super and the returns were okay. And if you added that up, that's nearly a billion dollars of revenue just in those brands alone. And the franchises that they afford us around the world is really quite something. That's what adds up to our half year performance. and I think we're pleased with where we are. It's been a volatile six months in 2026 and if someone had told me in late March, early April, this is where we'd be at the half year, I'd have more than taken it. 6.8% underlying revenue growth. Our profit's slightly ahead of our underlying growth, which is really quite an achievement because we've had no revenues in the Middle East and that really speaks to the underlying gearing in the business in the first half. We've had strong performances in both our main businesses, live events and in academic markets. You can see the cost of running all of our businesses in the Middle East with virtually no revenue since March in the profit comparison on the reported numbers where we're slightly behind where we were this time last year and actually if you just flick those numbers then our underlying profit this year would have been nearly 10% of the half year rather than 6.9% but still a very robust performance given where we are. We've got very very good full year visibility through to the end of the year. Our balance sheet is in good order. We're reaffirming our guidance and on shareholder returns we've taken our buyback up again for this year. We still believe our shares afford a good return and therefore we're happy to be a willing buyer and we've increased the interim dividend in line with our our performance at the half year for our dividend orientated shareholders. In V2B live events, 8% growth in the half year in aggregate varies a bit depending on where you are by geography, by category, by brand but very strong performance and the strength has been pretty universal actually if you look at it through a geographic lens it varies more by some individual categories which maybe we'll get into in questions. The second half matters to us and actually in a good way. We see that accelerating in the second half which will be helpful because it will take us strongly into the beginning of 2027. But now we enter the second half of the year in live events feeling good about what we're doing. As those colleagues on the live stream or in the room will know, this stairway to heaven for our B2B business is really just how we're knife and forking our way through Our planning, our approach to brand development and market position. Price for value, look at the markets we serve, see what level of penetration we have got and how much more we can get. Look at what we can do in geo expansion whether it's brand expansion or syndication or doing more with global cities which really is becoming quite a power lever for us as a company. Taking advantage of capacity and supply where it's coming into markets which it is. Really driving value into attendees. That was a Rubicon which 10 years ago no one was crossing. You can charge people to participate in a B2B event. Ticketing didn't feature, now it does. And then there's more value you can bring to your attendees if you've got the data and you understand your audience. And then what more can you do around an event to blow up and glam up the reality of being a participant, an exhibitor or a sponsor. so there are routes to revenue we're not doing them all of the time every day in every brand in every country for every customer but the good news is we're not doing that yet but that doesn't mean we can't tomorrow so there's a real opportunity for further expansion geographically we're pretty much everywhere we'd want to be we've got no need or desire to buy another business to give us a platform to operate geographically and so now in M&A we're focused on category and market vertical expansion or brand expansion and I think that that is is serving as well. Just to double click on what's actually happening in the b2b market given what's going on in the Middle East because this will be a question so please take this as your answer so I might refer you to see slide 11 First of all, as you can see in our numbers, when you find yourself in that situation, well what do you do? Well you make everything else work harder. So you seek to deliver out performance in other markets and you can see us doing that. Secondly, you see what you can do in terms of performance in those markets with domestic brands and with intra-regional participation because where we are seeing Participation Leakage. It's not local or intra-regional, it's international. So can you swap out local and intra-regional for international? Thirdly, double down on future business return through not doing what some people are doing, which is reduce your headcount, reduce your costs, exit the market, remove your brands and run for the hills. because that might serve you well for a month or a quarter but it doesn't serve you too well for three years or five years and we're building this business for the long term. Fourthly, defend the long term value of the brands. I say all the time to shareholders, this is an annuity business. We do this well, we do this right. You're looking at a business that will recur for five years, for ten years, for fifteen years, for twenty years. That's where the real long term value is and to do that you need to look after your brand's and how they're judged and within that, your customers. And as a practical matter, that means being very, very close to your customers and where needed, provide them with contract flexibility or rollover options or future credits in order to not feel that they're being strong-armed to participate if it doesn't suit their commercial position. That's our approach. It's serving us pretty well. And then on top of that, we're using our relationships and our market position to reschedule the brands. I think we're a bit, the battery's a bit dead in this. To reschedule the brands from the first half to the second half. And this gives you a sense. There are about 65 events that we're going to run in the region. The other thing I would say when people say to me, what's going on in the region? The region is a big place. And what's happening in India is completely different from what's happening in Egypt, which is completely different from what's happening in Nigeria, which is completely different from what's happening in the UAE. so you've really got to forensically unpeel that onion we've got about 65 events that are running in region in the second half and there are about seven of those that are scale events that are running in what you might call the more directly impacted markets just to give you a bit of a flavour the first two events off the taxi rank for us in the second half of the year in region are Middle East Energy in Dubai and the beginning of September and almost exactly coterminously our future technology event LEAP in Riyadh and both of those are kind of in market and trading as we speak. To switch into academic markets and this has really been a second or third improving quarter in a row or half in a row. Penny and the team are really getting into their stride. Strong underlying growth in the first year, just over 5%. Some of that's phasing, some of that's pre-booking. Some of that is a function of some things that will not recur. But the underlying shift in this business is this has gone from being a 1-2% growth business to being hopefully a 4% plus growth business. And I'm pretty confident that we can get this to our 5% minimum threshold by 2026. Sorry, by 2027. we're investing in this business we see an increasing demand for trusted content as I said in the opening validated authenticated content we're investing in international sales because we think here we can do more NGO expansion bit like we did in b2b and we were a little bit cautious and academic so we think there's an upside there we think we can do better in some underserved and unserved market segments as described here corporate and prosumer one of those words that probably won't make it into popular language but nevertheless it's a segment that we can serve and we can serve well given the nature of our content and we're also investing in in our own platform capability to make it easier for customers to discover to use to share and to work with our content the ambition for this business we've laid out very clearly this is where we were this is where we are this is where we're going those are the building blocks and underpinning it is turning this business into a knowledge platform that allows us to demonstrate progress in each of these areas. More volumes, more products, a focus on more markets and not just the librarian but adding customers and market segments, making it easier for people through technology capabilities to discover and use and to maybe reshape the culture a bit. The culture is very strong inside Taylor & Francis but making it a bit more customer focused, a bit more market focused, a bit more commercial and at the same time simplifying how we operate and being a bit more commercial on cost management, vendor consolidation and the input side of the business. And all of that discipline is adding up to a consistently better performance and that alongside what we're doing in our B2B markets business is really what gives us our half year number. Our latest venture, our newest venture in form of TechTarget, Shades of British Rail, for those of you as old as I am, it's getting there. This is not yet doing what we wanted it to do when we acquired this business or created this business. Lots of reasons for that. Some of it to do with AI displacement revenues. Some of it to do with the challenges facing the US enterprise technology market. some of it to do frankly with us getting it in the way of our own knitting and some of it to do with the complexity of a multi-layered combination. Put all of that in the operational blender you end up at minus one percent rather than plus six percent and that differential in revenue terms actually is about thirty to fifty million dollars of revenue. It's not a mountain that we can't climb but it's thirty to fifty million dollars of revenue that's in the wrong place. The growth rates are levelling out, or the negative growth rates are levelling out. We've got a simple target for this year, get it into growth, and then we're planning how we get into 27 and get this business to begin to do what it was designed to do. Do we think the fundamentals are still there?

We do.

And what we need to do is get to a point whereby that's visible enough to shareholders for us to regain their confidence in our judgment in that market. Underpinning it all, this is probably the most important thing going on inside the company at the moment. And the good thing about it is it was going on inside the company last year, it's going on inside the company this year, it'll be going on inside the company next year and the year after. If you go back to my brand slide, if the battery's now working, which it is, when you go from three or four brands to 500 brands at pace, As I often used to say to people who were considering joining our company, particularly in senior roles and particularly in technology and system roles, I make no apology for the fact that as a business, we learn to run before we can walk. When you do that, what you find is that your back office is not as robust as your front office. That's the price you pay for accelerated acquisition-led growth. The question is, how do you then reverse engineer the back office and the platforms to enable you to get even more out of the front office than you're getting just from a sales and commercial-led business? That's really a large part of what's behind One Informer. What do we do in order to provide platform capability, system capability, horizontal capability in everything from data discovery, data capture, data usage, new product development, marketing platforms, sales platforms, brand development and more recently how do we use AI to accelerate that which actually for us is probably a net benefit because one of the only advantages of being late is that technology then comes along and allows you to do it cheaper, quicker, better and if we do that and we bring those AI empowered enhancements to our operations One Informer will give us a better bedrock to further enhance the front office performance. In summary, this is where we are. The One Informer program continues at pace. It's putting stability and performance and maturity and capability into the hands of teams at a time, brands at a time, geographies at a time. We are keeping a weather eye on our top line because absent growth, nothing happens. We set ourselves a threshold of never drop below 5% and we're knocking that out quarter on quarter, half on half. We still think our shares are not at a point whereby they represent an appropriate value equation and therefore we're a happy buyer, hence the increase in the buybacks. Our B2B live events business is our biggest engine, so it needs to grow at the fastest rate. The market's growing at about 5, 5.5. We're the biggest player. We need to beat that. We're targeting ourselves 7% plus for the year. We did 8% at the half year. We want TNF to be a reliable 5% plus growth business, so it's not a drag on our growth ambition. It's getting there. Tech target, I've talked about. We need to make that a growth business, because then you get the benefit of the operational gearing. And all of that then flows through to EPS growth, which we want to see continue coming for our shareholders. Looking forward, what do you see? In 26, we can see about 85% of our revenue. That means we can all focus on the 15%, which shouldn't be too difficult. Our subscription revenues in academic are way ahead of where they normally were. That's part of the operating discipline that Penny and the team have brought. And actually, looking into 27, we can already see about $800 million of our 27 revenues which is a nice position to be in as we begin to plan for 27 and for those of you who follow the company and have done for a long time you'll know that uneven years are bigger years for us than even years because of the return of our biennials which are all conveniently in uneven years and the biennials sort of not surprisingly tend to be higher growth businesses partly because they only happen every two years so the level of pent up demand is a bit higher and so you don't just get a cash lift, you also bring into the portfolio big brands that tend to perform at a slightly higher growth pace performance. We're always keen to meet our investors so we did a field trip to the NRA show in In May, which I was not at, but apparently was a really outstanding brand and performance, and I gave a real insight, I think, how for many big food brands, household food brands, it brought to life the power of a trade show at scale in a key market. And then for those of you who have never been to a CPHI event, that really is well worth the time. Milan isn't so tricky to get to and it's, I think I'm correct in saying, our single biggest brand. It is the meeting place for that industry which right now is a real feature of innovation and new products and it's a really great way to see what we do live. That's where we are. We'll throw it open to questions. Who would like to go first? which run an auction. We'll take questions in the room first and I think we'll start over here on the far side if you don't mind. The lady in white as Christa Berg didn't sing.

Good morning, Annick Maas from Bernstein. I think my three questions are for Gareth, sorry.

Fantastic, I'll just sit down.

The first one is on TNF and the entropic court case that was settled with publishers. I think you know depending on the assumptions you take you will benefit from 25 to 50 million. I was wondering if you could just give us an idea of where in that range we will be and how it will be accounted for. I have other questions as well.

I think what we would say is you know we're still working through that. There are various variables in the numbers in terms of what titles are in there what are the costs etc so we're working through that we deliberately haven't put a number in this deck or these results for that reason we'll update you in the second half of the year as the number becomes clearer but I suspect there will be a number in our second half results for the settlement we're working through the accounting but I think it's you know at the moment I don't think it'll be revenue I think it's a settlement number so it won't change our full year revenue outlook for Taylor and Francis but as Stephen has mentioned we're confident about improving performance in the business on a full year basis in 26 versus a full year basis in 25 regardless of that.

Great, thank you. The rest is for B2B markets so I understand you're still negotiating with some exhibitors that were due to attend this year and they now want to maybe switch to next year. If all of those Thank you very much.

There's some revenue deferral for launches that we had planned to make in 2026 that we're now not going to launch in 2026. We'll do those in 2027. But on the other hand, we're also still working hard to identify opportunities. There are one or two opportunities to do targeted in-country launches. in the second half of 2026 that we're looking at both in the UAE and in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia that we think could come to fruition. So we're still working hard to maximize the 2026 revenue outcome. But we've accounted for what we know and what's visible in the fact that we can meet guidance at the moment.

Okay. My last one is easy. China, you mentioned it in the release. Does that mean that China is now growing or, you know, what would you say?

China's performing as we thought it would at the start of the year. We never needed a big uptick in performance in China to get to the guidance for the full year, and it's pretty much performing in line with those projections. I mean, the bull case on China would be a lot of the trading is in the second half of the year, so it's still to come. And therefore, you know, we'll hope for a better outcome, but we don't need a better outcome. It's in growth, but relatively low levels of growth. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. It's James Tate from Goldman Sachs. Just a couple of questions, please. I guess, firstly, on the Middle East, as we start to think about 2027, could you just talk about forward bookings for the shows scheduled through 2027? How are they looking now versus historically at this sort of stage of the year? and just to follow up on that I guess there's a lot of variation by show but how are forward bookings for the show running this year tracking into H2 so is around 10% down a fair assumption or some tracking better and I guess secondly could you just comment on the level of pricing growth you're putting through this year for 2027 events it's around three to four percent on average about the right ballpark everywhere or in the middle east everywhere um

yeah probably maybe a bit less depends because China is not really a price-led market so if you took everywhere the number might be nearer you know two to three than three to four but it might vary depending on where you are in the world if you're just talking about space pricing which I think you are forward pacing for 27 pretty good you see that in our forward booking number it's pretty similar I don't know Richard 800 versus this time last year is I think it's slightly ahead of where we were this time last year. I don't know to be honest. There's no significant variance number that's sort of flashing in my mind so I don't think that's an issue. Brackets yet, closed brackets, but not a visible one. What was your other question?

The Middle East shows that are running in H2, how do you expect them to run versus last year in terms of revenues?

Look, that is such a difficult question to answer without turning this presentation into an operating review brand by brand and country by country because what's going to happen in India is going to be totally different than what happens in the UAE to what happens in KSA to what happens in another country and then within that, to the point Gareth made, you know we've got an event coming in Abu Dhabi I think on the 29th 29th of September LiveX which is a kind of investment livability summit I think we've got 20,000 attendees registered about 50 exhibitors last time I looked at it we've got 50 country participants that you know that is going to have a completely different profile of attendees than Middle East Energy which is going to be more has got a bigger international profile and there the decline rate is probably higher Saudi Arabia I have a strong confidence will be pretty robust year on year so it varies really by geography and by brand but in the round I think we can what we're really trying to communicate today is based on what we know today we can see a way of navigating it through a combination of all the things I said on slide 11 which is you outperform where you can in other markets you bring new product to market which might be a bit more domestically focused which might compensate for some of your rollover you rollover into 27 which actually should help our 27 numbers where you need to and there that should end up being an outcome we can all live with thank you two questions given you have the mic we can just keep passing it down this side

Thanks, Will Larwood from Berenberg. Just firstly in terms of are you seeing any sort of delays to supply coming online, particularly in the Middle East? I know that was a key point that we spoke about at CMD. Secondly, you call out sort of looking at further licensing deals for data in Taylor & Francis. Just wondering if you could provide some more colour there, particularly what you're seeing in regards to pricing. And then finally, just in terms of, I was wondering if you could give us a margin, a guide on the margin, particularly given the moving parts into H2 for the full year.

Just, sure, on your first question, just unpack that a bit for me.

I think part of the thesis was that there was a lot of supply that was coming online. Oh, right, okay. Yeah, yeah. Okay, sorry.

Do you want to take the margin question? Do you want me to answer the first two first? I'll try that. We can time how long it takes the finance directors to work out the margin. On supply, I mean the good news about our business is that there's quite a bit of supply coming on in quite a few markets around the world. I mean the obvious place at scale is in the UAE where DEC has brought on 80% of the additional there'll be more supply next year and then more supply again the following year so there'll be a compounding effect of additional supply absent the current circumstances we would under normal circumstances pretty much be a we would have the view we could fill that that supply and there's nothing that's happening that would change our view on that but it's not just in that market the same is true in India the same is true in Thailand the same is true in parts of China and actually the same is true in some parts of North America so and you know in a way it's an underlying indicator because having now spent enough time around people who are either building venues or expending venues to do that you've got to finance it like everything in life and when you do the financing the way you go straight to is forward forecasting and utilization of which what we do for a living is a big part of it so In other words, in order to finance additional supply, what underpins that is a belief in incremental demand. So the two are, as you would expect, fellow travellers. So I don't think there's anything that's materially changed in our confidence there. On AI deals, yeah, we're in discussion with two. We haven't seen any material change on pricing to your specific question. Different people want different things in different formats in different ways. and over different timelines. We haven't signed any. That's not for any fundamental reason other than everybody needs to be happy with terms and timing and usage. But I don't think we've seen a material change and I think the importance of trusted, validated content as an input to the development of you know the intelligence dimension of autonomous intelligence capability is increasing it's not decreasing. On the margin, how are we doing?

Margin, I suspect the trigger for your question is that we're two percentage points down at the half year versus the half year last year. I mean the key dynamic in there is that in Q2 we haven't operated any events in areas like Dubai and Saudi Arabia but we have absolutely left the indirect cost base intact so we're ready for the bounce back in those operations in the second half of the year and we also remain positioned for medium-term structural growth in those markets because we're still very positive about those markets and the outlook for those going forward so we have got a bit of a drag on the margin in the first half but by the time you get back to the full year results you've operated the full portfolio we expect the margin to be up slightly year on year on a full year basis so we'll have worked out in the phasing.

Thanks. Yeah, thanks. That's Kieran Donnelly from Citi. A few more from me, again, on IMEA. I'm just going to ask directly, do you want to give us the assumptions for H2 and IMEA to get to the 7% guide for the B2B events portfolio? If you're not going to give that number, can you just give us an insight into how Middle East Energy, Leap and Money 2020 are trading, like for like year on year? and then thirdly, maybe Stephen, just in terms of you've obviously appointed David as CEO of Indy. I'm interested, you know, with everything that's gone on in the region, has anything changed this year in terms of, you know, getting that entity up and running in terms of going back to the investor day, obviously, last September or October? Has anything changed in terms of approach? Any insights on that would be interesting. Thanks.

I think I'm trying to answer your question by giving you some context. I'm not at all casual, believe you me, because to a degree I'm living it, about what's going on in that part of the world. But on the ground, it's not like, the day-to-day reality is not materially different. Businesses are buying and selling, people are trading, people are going to work. If you went to our office in any of those markets, they'd be full active and busy. The only thing that's materially changed since the appointment of David is that he's hired his finance director, who's just joined the company, Matty, last week. And the two of them are knee-deep in working out what the three-year plan numbers are going to be for 27, 28, 29. We had a launch event for the joint venture two or three weeks ago. We had about 1,000 people all together. I mean, to Gareth's point, we're a All systems go, all systems in, all market focused. There's nothing that's changed. Your first two questions are easier to answer. No and no. And why? Because it's sort of, if we started giving brand by brand, event by event, pacing by pacing, day by day, we wouldn't be doing an investor presentation, we'd be having a sales office meeting, which you're welcome to join, but you'd have to give up your day job. So the headline that we're trying to communicate is there's clearly dislocation in the market. Where are we seeing that dislocation as a negative to revenue? We're seeing it in largely European and American exhibitors who actually in most instances, largely for reasons of practical logistics, they can't freight their exhibit capability to the event. at which point it doesn't really make sense and there I didn't want to pick up on the word that was used earlier we're not having a negotiation with them we're having a conversation with them about what works because we want them to be customers next year, the year after, the year after, the year after and by and large those customers those customer conversations are very productive and our levels of cancellation are somewhere between de minimis and zero. So the issue is when you face that situation you're into rollover and rebook for 27 rather than anything else. How do you deal with that? Well you focus on the markets for where that travel dislocation is not so serious and that takes you to a greater level of market penetration on domestic suppliers, domestic exhibitors or intra-regional suppliers and intra-regional exhibitors. The Saudi Arabian market is a bit different because I would say most if not all of our technology customers who are international have material in-market physical presence. And so whilst it may be the case that metaphorically the 50 people from global tech company X who are coming from America may not attend, that doesn't mean that the 50 people from Global Tech Company X who are in region won't attend. So you might have a different composition of attendees, but maybe not a lower volume. So it'll be a different mix. Money 2020 is a very different proposition because it's not really an exhibitor event in the same way. So you don't have the same freighting implications. So that gives you some texture. Then on top of that, we're bringing new products to market. LiveX will be a completely new product. Wasn't in the plan, wasn't in the budget. wasn't in the market and that's singularly focused on livability and investment in region and actually that's very attractive and I think we might end up at 20-25,000 attendees in the event that we didn't have in our plan so net when you level it all out and you go back to slide 11 that's why we're saying what we're saying today.

Perfect thanks.

Just if you can have just

Yeah, morning. It's Nick Dempsey from Barclays. I've got two left, please. So just to come back on your comments on 27, going back to the AGM update, you were saying that your forward bookings into first half 27 meant that B2B events were pacing to deliver strong growth. Now you're talking about visibility building positively, and you talked about the 0.8 billion being up. Is there any change there? Are you still happy with what you said about delivering strong growth from B2B Events back at the AGM. And the second question, Taylor and Francis performing pretty well now and you're talking about it improving a little bit more into next year. Maybe you can remind us of the fit of this business within the group and tell us whether you ever receive offers for this unit.

Hi, Nick. I'm glad you managed to make it. I don't really have much to add. I mean, I think the real question on the first half of 27 will pivot around, you know, where are we? We're in July. I think by the time we get to November, I mean I'm using rough dates, by the time we get to November, if there is still a level of uncertainty in the first half of 27 in that part of the world, I think there might be a different question for WHX than there is for Gulf Food. Because again, to go back to the answer to Kieran's question you know that the profile is different the exhibitor mix is different the physicality of the activity participation is different but right now we're not seeing anything in the first half that would make us change our view on T&F that we've discussed this many many times over many years you know you know we don't own that business we operate that business and I think what we're demonstrating is that we're operating that business with focus on where the future of that business is going to be which is going to still be in the majority servicing academic institutions, librarians, researchers, authors but increasingly other users, corporate users, prosumer users, research funders and different geographies as advanced learning expands around the world outside the traditional geographic centres of advanced learning. and if we can do that and improve our operating discipline inside the business both on the cost side and the revenue side and we can maybe put a little bit more money more effectively into technology services, we think that recipe means that Taylor & Francis can be part of our growth club at the level that we regard as a kind of minimum viable growth rate for the sort of proposition we're trying to make to shareholders and that's where we are. It's a question in the front here, and then Nick, could you just pass the... We've only got one mic. Here, in here.

Thank you.

It's Charlie Muir-Sands from BNP Paribas.

At the full year results, you put up a slide with some sort of traffic lights highlighting a couple of end markets that I think you refer to a third party as appraising maybe at slightly greater AI risk. I just wondered... With respect to those, or indeed any others, if you could give any colour about whether you're actually seeing some of those end industries, I think media, financial services, IT were the ones on the amber scale which are perhaps underperforming the others or not. And then secondly, on Taylor & Francis, I think you previously talked about seeing journal submissions up sort of 20% year on year. What's the gap between the conversion? Is it that e-textbooks are dragging? Is it that there's just more slop and you're trying to maintain the quality standards? Or is there a bottleneck issue in your ability to process that input to convert to revenues or something else? Thank you.

Great questions. My, you know, if you want my thought for the day, half year reflections, which executive colleagues who are here have heard me say in being around our end markets in the first six months of the year, this is not very revelatory. AI is everywhere in all of our events. I mean, it's sort of obvious, but when you see it as a content track, as a theme track, as an exhibitor participation, it's the pace of that I mean I've seen you know a few of these technology cycle changes I've been super struck by whether you're in health or pharma or finance or technology or food or agriculture or health care the the presence of it and its application to either workflow improvement or process improvement or speed to market is very real and very visible so there is definitely It's a visible reality everywhere. Where are we finding a net drag? I'm not sure we are finding a net drag in what we do anywhere. I think the markets where it's either a net drag or an amber are pretty well documented and we did, as you say, highlight some of those where you're seeing Already today and prospectively pretty soon tomorrow, timelines to execution shrinking at pace and price of what previously was largely white-collar workflow process just being repriced. But we're not really seeing that affect our revenues. If anything, it's probably a net gain for us because many of these AI suppliers and the segmentation of the AI market. I mean foundation AI gets all the headlines but there are a whole series of AI sub layers which are really featured in many of our events. So now I think positive. It's a bit relevant to your TNF question because I think one of the questions for research publishing generally but specifically for us also is how do we retain validation, authentication, verification and I don't think I've ever had an academic conversation where someone's used the slop word before. How do we retain all those benefits and compress the timeline? Because you're absolutely right, the volume in, so the value out. I mean, to any independent observer of this business activity, it doesn't add up. And believe me, we're very alive to that. And it's a bit back to the earlier question from Nick. you know one of the things we believe we can do is use machine intelligence and process significant process improvement to increase that that flow without in any way shape or form decreasing the quality. To your very specific point submission numbers are still up and so it's not a supply issue it's a management process technology but critically with quality maintained if not improved. Interesting Eric. Very interesting area for us. Questions just here? Richard, are you getting questions from online?

Hi, it's Steve from Deutsche News. Just three, I guess. One is, on general trading, Relics referenced sort of ex-Middle East some disruption in their overall international events. it's not something that we're seeing in your numbers certainly just any comments of any specific areas of weakness relative to your peers and competitors secondly my working assumption is Saudi is pretty underweight US and Western visitors exhibitors as you've kind of alluded to can you just remind us generally what number to work off for a Dubai based event in terms of US and Western revenue, let's say, overall. And then last question is just on TNF. We kind of talked at the CMD about the mid-term target to increase almost direct digital deals that aren't one-off L&M training but more subscription-type models. Can you just give an update on how that's developing overall?

Sorry, I let my mind run for the answer to your second question. I didn't capture that bit.

Yes, the last question is on T&F. At the CMD, one of the drivers in the mid-term to get to 5% was doing almost longer-term digital AI type deals for data as opposed to training LLMs, which are kind of one-off inherently.

Okay. No is the short answer to your first question. I mean, have there been some locations and some geographic locations and some specific circumstances where we've had a disruption? Yes, but I mean, as you know well, that happens. That's kind of like, you know, events, dear boy. But we haven't seen anything structural outside of the much discussed situation in the UE and KSA and in the Middle East. I think your working assumption on KSA is probably right although just to restate what I said earlier it is also the case that partly because of what's happened in the development of the economy in that country there have been many companies of scale who have built international companies of scale what you describe as US or Western that have physical presence at scale in the market and so the international participation doesn't have quite the same travel dependency if that makes sense to you. In the UE it's so various I mean I'll give you two examples you know LiveX and Middle East Comic Con will be like a hundred percent domestic and intra-regional. Middle East Energy will be probably 60-40 so it really varies it varies so much depending upon the brand. By definition, I'm not telling you anything you don't already know and probably know better than me. You know, the UAE economy is an expatriate economy. The Saudi economy is more of a domestic economy at a sort of meta level. But when you take it down to our individual show brands, it can really vary. On TNF, yes, it's part of the reason we just brought in a new lady who's joined us from Walter's Clure to run our corporate and prosumer business inside TNF. and really look at how do we take to market new products and services on a contract and term basis for a whole range of different type of customers. Those could be, we do do it already in licensing, quite well actually, but those tend to be licensing deals but to existing customers rather than licensing or product deals to new customers. So we think that really could be That could be quite a rich theme for us. And percentages, I often say, are the work of the devil. A percentage point of growth is £6 million worth of revenue. So two percentage points of growth is £12 million worth of revenue. I could be the finance director if I keep going at this. So if you take that category and you say, right, let's put some real product innovation, product formats, you invest for sales capability which is used to a different sales cycle, a different booking approach, a different usage and you can have a technology, a platform that can naturally work with a workflow for a corporate that employs 3,000 research scientists. In America there are a goodly number of those. That's a market. Historically, that's a market we've never spent any time paying attention to. That's really what Penny was pointing at when we were looking at that market. Does that make sense?

Last questions?

In the room? Going, going? Gone? And anything online? Okay, very conscious it's nearly summer. Thank you very much for being here in person. Much appreciated. It's much more enjoyable talking to people than empty chairs. and to the people who joined us on the live stream, thank you very much and we look forward to seeing you in November at IMS.