Informa Stock

Good morning, and thanks very much for taking the time to join us. It's been a busy few weeks, and it's certainly going to be a busy day today. So, I'm just going to take you through a short summary of what we've announced today, and then we'll throw it open to questions. I'm joined by Gareth and Richard, Gareth Wright, the Group CFO; and Richard Menzies-Gow, our Director of IR and Communications. The disclaimer, just in case you haven't seen it or read it, lays out the backdrop to what we're announcing today, which is 2 things and hopefully, a picture about the future of the Informa company.

Our focus here is on growth and expansion and on international expansion. We're really announcing 2 things: one, that it's time to separate our growing, expanding and performing Academic business, Taylor & Francis, from the Informa Group, and I'll come back and talk about that. We are further expanding our position in B2B markets and in Live Events by the addition of the Clarion Events company to the Informa portfolio. And that will allow us an opportunity through that expanded portfolio to grow internationally.

We're updating the market also just for the record on where we are on operating performance. Nothing has really changed since our Half-Year update. We continue to see a strong performance in the businesses around the world. So our guidance remains unchanged. We've got particular strength in the Americas and in Europe and in Asia. Our events after postponement and rescheduling in EMEA have returned. We've run nearly 20 brands in Abu Dhabi, in Dubai, in Riyadh and around the wider region. We have a portfolio scheduled through to the end of the year.

Obviously, there are still circumstances in that region that one has to pay attention to, but I want to pay real testimony to our partners and indeed our colleagues in that region and our customers who are focusing on the day-to-day and what our businesses can provide to our customers in situations that perhaps in some circumstances, we wouldn't want. Post-the-Clarion acquisition, our live events business will step up its growth rate a bit. And certainly, as a separate company, the B2B business will click along at a higher growth rate.

And that's part of our continuing focus in that business. Taylor & Francis, it's our intention now to look at a separate future for that business. That's a change, but one that has been asked and discussed many times over the years. The business itself is about 3x to 4x the size of what it was, certainly when I first started doing this job and considerably larger than when it joined the Informa Group nearly 20 years ago. But it's now time. It's a scale business. It's a fully credible and capable Open Access business. It's a more international business.

We're building and deploying our own wholly operated and owned technology capability, and we see a much better future for that business independently, and we think there's an opportunity to do that in a measured way. Clarion -- well, Clarion is a business we know super-well. We've followed it for many years. We've watched its own development and scale. Lisa Hannant, the Chief Executive, over the last few years, has further developed that business, both in brands and categories and also in services and in value contribution to customers. It's earnings-accretive to the Informa company from the get-go going into 2027.

And I'll unpick that a little in a second. But in summary, our announcement today is about further growth, more focus as a pure-play B2B business and a separate Academic business and further international expansion. What will the Informa company be once this is completed? The Clarion business will come into the Informa Group in early December, and the separation process for Taylor & Francis will run through the first half of 2027. It will make the remaining Informa company a focused, pure-play B2B group of scale and quality.

Our Live Events revenue alone will be nearly $5 billion, just over GBP 4.2 billion, growing at about 7% annually. There'll be about 1,000 brands in that portfolio serving 40 markets and operating in 30 countries at scale. We'll have over 9 million attendees and nearly 0.25 million exhibitors globally, a powerful audience and data source for us as a business.

We'll have at the other side of both of those decisions, real balance sheet strength and the business will delever through '27 to see us back down at around 2.5x regardless of what happens with the Taylor & Francis separation process. Geographically, particularly topical today, given the combination with Clarion, like us, a U.K-headquartered business with its history starting in the United Kingdom, but has become truly international, very similar to Informa.

Actually, our U.K. operating presence will grow as a result of the combination with Clarion, but still for the combined company, it will be about 4% of our revenue. Biggest market by far, Americas, followed by EMEA and Continental Europe and then Asia and Australia, a truly international market-leading business headquartered and listed in the United Kingdom, but with an ambition for further growth. Quick touch on '26. We're continuing to see a steady to strong performance despite the challenging conditions that we've lived through and are living through in parts of the Middle East.

We've had very strong performance in some key market categories. We were delighted to see our live events return at scale in the Middle East, and we've got comfortable visibility into Q4, both in terms of revenues booked and customer commitments. And therefore, we reaffirm our guidance both on the revenue line and on the earnings -- Adjusted Earnings growth for this year. To just touch a little bit on Taylor & Francis. This really has been the mainstay of the Informa company.

For those people who followed our business over many years, it really was the thing that helped create what became Informa when it first combined with the historical Informa Conference and Business Publishing business. We've grown this business significantly over many years. And over the last 10-to-15 years, we've really focused on entering perhaps slightly late, but with focus when we did -- the Open Access market through a combination of acquisition and product development, diversifying the customer focus from the library and the institution to a wider group of researchers and funders -- further internationalizing the business.

If you look at geographic source location for submissions, particularly in advanced learning in the Journals business and also building technology and service capability in order to offer both researchers and academics more dynamic, agile and real-time service capability. It's a very capable and credible business. It's operating now from a position of strength. In Penny Ladkin-Brand and the Management Team, we have a very credible Management Team of experience and depth and fresh perspective and ambition.

And therefore, we think now is the time for us to engage publicly in public sight with people who may be interested in talking to us about the future of this business, and we'll do that in a measured way over the next 3 or 4 months, and then come back and update the market alongside our annual results in March of next year as to what we think the most effective route-to-separation is for that business.

Our criteria for outcome will be what's the best thing for that business, what's the best thing for our authors, our researchers, our colleagues, our customers and what is the most sensible thing from the point of view of our shareholders who today own 100% of that business in the way in which we separate it. But our destination is this market. We set out 13, 14 years ago that we would build and buy our way into the B2B Live Event market at scale. We started with a very small portfolio of trade shows.

Our history was in volume spot conferences, but we had a dozen or so brands, interesting brands in the trade show market of scale. And since then, we have built, we have bought, we have partnered, we've expanded, we've acquired. And today, we are adding the Clarion Events company, which I'm delighted to be able to confirm. We actually first had a conversation with the Clarion company back at the end of 2013, early 2014 when we were forming our own strategy. We saw this market.

We thought there was an opportunity for someone to build a business of global scale. Clarion, similarly, was a U.K.-based business with a focus on this industry. We couldn't make that partnership work then, but here we are -- the rewards of patience. The Clarion business has changed itself beyond recognition over that period, much more international, much more diversified, much more focused in key market categories, and will be a very good complement to our own business. We're financing this through a combination of debt and equity.

We launched a placing this morning to sit alongside the debt financing. That will see us sit below our 3x leverage limit and then the business will continue to delever through 2027. It will add a range of brands in a number of categories that we, as a company, are not in today to sit alongside our top 50 brands. They'll bring 8, what we call marquee and power brands into our top 50 brands. It will bring 30-plus brands into our category of brands that have over GBP 5 million of revenue or give a combined portfolio of 1,000 Live Event brands and over 100 Marquee & Power Brands.

This is a world-leading portfolio of capability serving multiple industry categories in multiple geographies with brands of, in many cases, many years of longevity. And the genius of this business, of course, is to be the market brand and refresh that market brand, both in products and content in a way that keeps it live and vital for the customers that you are serving. Specifically, they have built a market-leading position in Electronics, in Defense & Security and in Gaming. All 3 of those are markets that are in growth. And then they also have an interesting position in Technology and in Energy, where we also have a portfolio, albeit operating in some other geographies.

And the combination of their position in Technology and Energy with what we do really deepens our category position in those 2 categories. So we have market entry in Electronics, in Defense and Security and in Gaming, and we have a deepening of our market strength in Technology and Energy. All 5 of these are growth categories that have the features that we have sought to pursue as we've built and bought our business. International, large scale, a distributed supply chain, a variety of different manufacturers, high-margin end markets, growth and a distributed community of wholesalers, distributors, buyers, sellers for whom the trade show and associated services is a very compelling value proposition.

Geographically, it further expands our business internationally. Yes, we're headquartered here in the United Kingdom. Yes, we are and will remain listed here in the United Kingdom, but we have built a truly international business, both in daily operation and in reach. America, no surprise, is our largest market. Asia and China and Hong Kong, in particular, is a Scale Market. Continental Europe is a big market, but actually really is an international set of brands hosted in Europe, not just dependent upon European revenues.

And then our unique position in India, the Middle East and Africa, where we have built pretty much from scratch in Saudi Arabia, a market-leading position. We've expanded our historical start point in the United Arab Emirates through partnership there to create a very powerful Joint Venture. And we are the market leader in India, in Egypt, in Turkey and in Bahrain, and we are building out into Africa. The opportunity for us to take the Clarion brands into new geographic markets, we've laid out in our release today. It's part of the synergies that we can see, the revenue synergies.

We've done that in our prior additions. We're very comfortable with our ability to do it and that there is market demand and market capacity. Looking at the growth characteristics of this combination, we can see significant operating synergies. As the Investors know, we've done this before. This is very much in line with what we achieved when we brought the Tarsus business into the Group. We brought the UBM business into the Group. We brought the Ascential business into the Group. And this is very focused. If there's any colleague in Clarion is looking at this and thinking this is code for job reduction.

There will be some duplication and overlap in the center. But we are acquiring this business for growth and investment and expansion. And our focus really is on extracting synergies at the operating level through procurement, through supply, through expansion, through distribution, through efficiency, through technology, and where we can, removal of duplicate costs. But our primary focus is on the right-hand side of this slide, which is how do we drive growth. The Clarion business is actually growing at a faster rate than our own business today at the margin, but strongly.

We want to continue that or improve it. We can see a route to doing that, partly through international expansion, partly through Geo-Cloning, partly through additional services, partly through pricing, partly through better yields. And importantly, this combined business will have a powerful audience. And this industry is moving from being a Sales-Led to a Marketing-Led business and a Space-Sale business to an audience-delivery business and expanding your audience and having the data around your Audiences profile, activity, and interest area is the future destination for the combined group.

So Short-Term powerful operating cost synergies, Mid-Term revenue synergies. And over the period, the combination of those 2 things allows us to see earnings accretion from the get-go when we close in December. This business, we're acquiring it for just over GBP 2 billion, GBP 2.24 billion -- that is 11x the 2027 adjusted EBITDA. 2027 is in the jargon and up here for the Clarion business like our own; they have a series of biennials, which run in '27 and don't run in '26 or '28.

Same is true in our business. If you bleed through the cost synergies, which we have a high degree of confidence in, and the revenue synergies, which we worked through based on our experience most recently of doing that post the Ascential acquisition, it's an 8x EBITDA acquisition. The financial profile, if you look at the '27 revenues, is just over GBP 575 million of revenue. Like our business -- our events business, it's a kind of 30% plus operating margin. And actually, their business is growing at just over 10%.

About GBP 100 million of that revenue is biennial revenue. So, it's a kind of 20% uptick on 2026. But that gives us our first year of combination because we'll complete in December of this year; we will go into 2027 as one business. That will allow us to get into the launches and the geo-cloning activity in '27 for '28. And so, the move from '27 -- a biennial up year to '28 will be less of an adjustment than it might have been as a stand-alone business. And that, we think, in profit terms will allow us to continue the path to earnings growth.

In financing terms, we're doing a placing today of just over 9% of our revenue. When I left the call before I came to this presentation, we had the book for that placing more than covered. We wall-crossed a series of our shareholders over the last 2 or 3 days. We have a single institutional large shareholder who is fully supporting the placing, and we have confidence that we will complete that placing in an efficient manner. We're very conscious that we're issuing equity. We do that with considerable thought on both returns and on Value Creation for our shareholders.

We see a very straightforward path to de-levering down to -- back to 2.5x by the end of '27. As people who know our company well will know, we've been out of the acquisition game for 2.5 years to bed in the Ascential and Winsight acquisitions. We've largely completed that. We've been tracking the Clarion business for some time. And whilst the sequencing of this has required us to use equity as a part of the consideration, we think the end destination for our shareholders will be very value-enhancing, short-term earnings-accretive and long term, very value-enhancing as we emerge from the other side of separation of our education and Academic business to being a pure-play B2B business.

And that, I think, will create much greater clarity in our equity proposition alongside our growth trajectory. What underpins that growth trajectory is what we've talked about to Shareholders for a few years now. How do we build and accelerate growth beyond simple more-physical expansion, although there is much of that going on in parts of the world? How do we do it by pricing more for value? How do we do it by increasing our penetration of markets we're in? How do we do greater geo-expansion? How do we maximize the available increase in capacity and supply? How do we drive more value for attendees, and therefore, for us?

And then how do we sell and provide more services to our customers to amplify the value that brings them to our products and services in the first place? There's nothing about that stairway to heaven that does not apply to the Clarion business. Lisa and the team there have done much work on that. And we think, in combination, we can do more work on that. And in combination, we can do better work. And that, I think, will serve our customers, and therefore, our Shareholders extremely well. That, in a nutshell, is what we're announcing today. It's a big moment for our company. It's been a long time coming.

We've been building this business for many years. We're very confident in the power of Live. We're very confident in the power of market leadership. We're very confident in the power of international expansion and revenue and geographic diversification to provide security for the ups and downs that happen in any diversified portfolio business. To the Shareholders who've committed to us already to participate in the placing, many thanks. To those who are considering it, please do. And to Clarion colleagues who may be watching, we very much look forward to working with you in the years ahead. And now we'll turn to questions.

[Operator Instructions] We will now take our first question from George Webb of Morgan Stanley.

A couple of questions from me around Clarion to start off with. Firstly, could you talk a little bit about how you think about the durability of Clarion's Underlying Growth? The release flags that around 10% growth rate into 2027. Is that a level, with the benefit of Revenue Synergies, that you think is perhaps sustainable in the mid-term? Or what are your assumptions there? And then secondly, with regards to the integration that Clarion will involve, -- you've seen many integrations over the past acquisitions over the past years. Where does Clarion fit in with that spectrum of difficulty or ease from your perspective?

Look, great questions. I'll take both of those. I think on the second one on integration, I mean, I'm never casual about it. I mean, we're having a conversation between the 2 of us and maybe a few others online, but there are 2,000 colleagues who work at Clarion. And today's announcement, on a human level, will, in some way, shape or form, change their professional lives. I believe for the better. And I think we've got evidence that, that is the case. If you are a committed event professional who sees this as a rewarding and stimulating way to earn a living, there is no better place to do it than inside Informa.

We are more than committed to building the best business in the world that is in this industry, and we see value and expansion in innovation and creativity and career opportunity. That would be my message to Clarion colleagues. We're proud of the company we've built and bought here over the last few years. We've welcomed many colleagues, as you point to, from other companies. And I think most of them would say that, that process of integration is done with an eye on the financials because we're a business, but through a human lens. This is a People Business. It's a Talent Business, and we understand that and cherish it.

My knowledge of the Clarion community, our conversations with Lisa, our reflection on what we've learned from other businesses is that the Clarion company and the Informa company will combine, I think, very smoothly. We have much in common stylistically. We have a similar operating approach. We're very focused on high-quality execution. We have many colleagues who know each other. We won't be assumptive, but I have a high degree of confidence that having done this 5 or 6 times that this combination will really hit the ground running and very effectively.

On the growth rate, for our own growth assumptions, we've made some adjustments in our own minds about whether 10% is doable every year. Again, if a Clarion colleague is watching, feel free to make that 12%. But we think there's always some ups and downs, but we can see a path to the combined businesses having a very credible target of a 7% plus-or-minus recurring growth rate. And within that, there'll be some changes depending on which brands and which categories. But the fundamentals of this business, which is really what this chart speaks to, the future opportunities for growth are significant.

And we, as the market leader, will be afforded some significant opportunities that are not presented to other people in market access, in brands, in audience knowledge and understanding, in our ability just simply on a percentage of revenues to invest in technology and data handling capability and in bringing new products to market. So I have real confidence in what we can do together on the Growth Agenda.

And we'll now take our next question from Annick Maas of Bernstein.

I have a few questions on synergies and then on Taylor & Francis. So firstly, on synergies, what proportion of cost synergies are already validated? And how many of your revenue synergy target really rely on new event launches? And maybe can you also give us some of the delivery dates of both these revenue-cost synergies and the proper cost synergies? That's my synergy question. The other one is on Taylor & Francis. Firstly, why do you acquire Clarion before selling off Taylor & Francis and not the other way around?

And then just on Taylor & Francis, I think you said your criteria for selling it is Shareholders being happy. Can you maybe elaborate on this and also tell us how you plan to assess tax stranded costs and debt allocation here?

Okay. Well, I'll take the second question and maybe come to Gareth and possibly Richard, on the operating and revenue synergies.

On timing, I mean, I wish we controlled everything, but we don't. And we've made these 2 announcements simultaneously for the purposes of transparency. But please take it as a fact because it is a truth that these are 2 coincidental processes. We, on a regular basis as a business, we've had this discussion with the markets many times, review the portfolio on a regular basis to see whether it continues to make sense both for the business itself and for Shareholders to be in the markets that we're in.

And independently, the process that was reviewing our position in the Academic business was reaching an inexorable conclusion that, as I said in my opening remarks, it was time. The business was performing. It was capable. It was of a certain scale. In the competition for Capital Allocation, it was perhaps getting to a point, not at a point, but getting to a point whereby as the B2B business just got bigger and bigger and bigger, it would lose out in those discussions.

And it was ready to be a standalone business. Separately, the owners of the Clarion business opened up a discussion in the first instance about the disposal of Clarion East, and it became clear to us that the most efficient way to drive maximum operating and revenue synergies, which Gareth will come on and talk about -- was actually to take the entirety of Clarion for a whole variety of reasons. And so the ordering effect was not within our control. But just to be clear, we will de-lever as a business post the acquisition of Clarion through '27.

So to your point about selling the Taylor & Francis business, that may well be an outcome, but there may be other outcomes. The point we're making here is that it is ready to be a standalone business, and we are ready as the Informa Group to be a pure-play business and have a clearer and sharper equity proposition. And also from an operating point of view, partly to go to your question around operating performance and the prior question around growth, we think that will also enhance the single-mindedness of our operating performance.

On operating and revenue synergies, the operating synergies, we're very confident on and they come as this chart lays out in a number of different buckets. On the revenue synergies, we're similarly confident, but they're a bit more phased. But Gareth, do you want to take those 2 questions?

Yes. On the revenue synergies, it's worth highlighting two particular elements, the international syndication of events and geo-adaptation. Basically very similar to what we did in the Ascential combination, taking the Money20/20 event to Riyadh. One of the great things about the portfolio that we're combining with today is it has a low footprint in the Middle East and therefore, giving us a lot of opportunity there.

And then secondly, looking at new revenue streams through lead generation and digital services, very similar to what we're doing in One Informa in our existing business, rolling out that capability to the new portfolio of events that we're combining with. In terms of phasing, as the top right-hand corner of those 2 boxes show GBP 50 million of Operating Synergies and GBP 25 million of Revenue Synergies run rate by the end of 2029. We'd expect some benefit from those in 2027, but really the weighting is towards 2028. where we're at a kind of a fuller expression certainly the Operating Synergies. And then we'll have the full values there on the screen by 2029. So that's kind of how the phasing works, a bit in '27, but primarily coming through in '28.

And our next question comes from Charlie Muir-Sands of BNP Paribas.

Congratulations on this potential deal. Firstly, with respect to Clarion as an operator, I just wondered if you could phrase where you think that they are already ahead and/or behind Informa where you can learn from each other or leverage capabilities that they've developed that you don't have with respect to best practice and systems and so forth? Secondly, can you just clarify whether beyond the EBITDA, there are any minorities in the Clarion business? And thirdly, you're obviously mentioning aiming to close the deal by the end of December. So what confidence do you have that there are no antitrust issues with your acquisition.

Thanks for the questions. I mean on antitrust, we'll go through the processes, but there's no category overlap really to speak of. And the geographic distribution is such that in no market do we see a threshold issue or a competition issue. They do have some partnerships, and we are very familiar with that. That's a big part of our Operating Model. Obviously, this has been a confidential process, so we've not yet met the partners, but we have deep experience of working with partners, either Trade Association partners or, in many cases, government partners or venue partners.

So, I think we feel very comfortable that we will be able to slot into those partnership models in a way that we understand, and we've done due diligence on the structures and the obligations that exist with those. Learn from each other. I hope so. I hope, and I'm not just saying this, I think all of my colleagues would verify this. We approach every combination we've done as a combination, even if we're the buyer. I'm deeply conscious that when we started on this journey, we were one of the smallest live event B2B trade show businesses in the world, and we've become a bit bigger than that. But we've done that by learning as we go.

We brought fantastic colleagues into the company, fantastic leaders from businesses we brought into the company, many of whom are still with us. And I think the transfer of knowledge between additions has been powerful. And our commitment is we're building a world-leading business in what we do. We saw this market. We believe we could create a category leader. And then we could innovate on top of the base level trade show products and services. Clarion has started doing some of that, much like we have in other services.

And we've looked with interest at what they're doing and vice versa. But I think it will be a very productive exchange of experiences and views, not least because they are servicing slightly different markets for us, slightly back to your competition point. And what you do for different end markets also teaches you different things about how to do it, and that's very additive. So, I think when I say the combination will be complementary, I mean that in a learning sense as much as in a financial sense.

I understand that, obviously, many of these trade shows you have the organizations you're working with. But just with respect to the financials, are you quoting on your acquisition multiple Informa's share of EBITDA after any kind of fees? Or is there actual minority interest below EBITDA that we should take into consideration in our valuation of this deal?

No and yes. In other words, none of our partners' profits or proceeds or revenue share is in our multiple calculations, but we're well-aware that there are in their P&L, and we've accounted for that in the way in which we've worked out our ROIC and our growth and our earnings accretion.

And we'll now take our next question from Ayush Ghosh of Barclays.

Just 3 questions from me. So, when you're looking at the value of Taylor & Francis, how important is it that Springer Nature trades on a low multiple likely due to the very low liquidity of their shares? Does that listed benchmark hold back what you can value Taylor & Francis at? And then a question on de-levering back below the 2.5x net debt to EBITDA. After that, will buyback once again become an important part of your capital allocation? And then a quick one on the Defense shows in Clarion's portfolios. Do those shows have any implications for your ESG ratings?

We don't think so on your last question. On your second question, yes, once we've de-leveraged and we've come out of the other side of separation, we would intend to return to the buyback process. On the first question, I've got no comment on the valuation of other businesses. I have a very clear view of the unique value that is the Taylor & Francis company.

And we'll move on to our next question from Sean Kealy of Panmure.

I've got 2, if I may. I think, first of all, you touched on the fact that Blackstone were looking to sell Clarion East, but you thought you'd get the most synergies out of buying the whole business. Could you maybe sort of elaborate a little bit on sort of which parts of the portfolio you think are most attractive? -- and just sort of how you went through that process, first of all? And then secondly, just on Taylor & Francis, have you explored a sale privately before sort of announcing the separation? I'm just trying to get a sense of where you are in the process of looking at that asset.

Thank you. We've had -- on your last question, we've had approaches over the years, as you do when you're a portfolio business. That isn't what has provoked this decision. It's -- we have been, I think, disciplined, rightly disciplined as a business, that we review the portfolio every year and indeed, the portfolio within sub-businesses to ensure that we're getting both maximum performance and maximum return for the assets we own and where we're deploying capital. As the Taylor & Francis business has grown and developed, it has attracted a different, if you like, drive-by interest.

But that isn't why we've made the recommendation today. That's an absolute judgment that it's now -- it's ready to be a stand-alone business. And it was -- in my humble opinion, I wasn't in the company then, I joined the company shortly after the combination with what was then the various Informa assets made imminent sense to me strategically from the outside. But this is built into 2 very separate businesses, and it will be better for both to proceed on that basis. On the Clarion acquisition, our judgment was, and I think it's demonstrated in the Cost-Synergies and the Revenue-Synergies, that it was cleaner and simpler for us.

And also, we had a unique advantage as a buyer. I think we were probably one of, if not the only person who could achieve the combination of Revenue and combination of Synergies. And that just gave us a competitive edge in the whole conversation rather than in a piece-part conversation with the seller. Not for me to speculate on what was in the seller's mind, although, as you can imagine, I've tried to work that out over the last few weeks and months. But from our Shareholders' point of view and from the market's point of view, the entire portfolio was most valuable to us for the reasons we tried to lay out today.

And we'll now take our next question from Victoria Stern from Barclays.

Victoria from Barclays Credit Research Team. So congratulations on the announcement. I have a couple of questions, specifically on the debt side. So first, you indicated that you intend to de-lever in '27 and have leverage below 2.5x. So does that mean that you remain committed to your 1.5x to 2.5x leverage target range? And then wondering if you had any discussion with the rating agency and if you remain committed to your mid-BBB rating.

On the leverage range, I mean, yes, at the moment, we're announcing the combination with Clarion, which we have financed with a combination of debt and equity, as Stephen outlined earlier. And we've done that to stay below the 3x level and then de-lever back into our leverage range of 1.5x to 2.5x, as you stated, within 2027. That is our leverage range for the time being. We're conscious that as we go through the separation process with Taylor & Francis, we may need to revisit that. I'm not saying we necessarily do, but we may need to revisit that leverage range. And we'll do that when we're clear on what the outcome of the separation process is.

As Stephen just said in the answer to the previous question, we're very early in that thinking, and therefore, it would be wrong to make a definitive statement about what our leverage range might be the other side of it. In terms of the rating agencies, they have been briefed on this transaction. As you'd expect, they're taking it away to chew on it and to understand what it means. We've been clear to them that we're committed to our investment-grade credit rating that we have -- that our financial policy has been oriented towards. And as a reminder on that, we're BBB or equivalent. We are -- there's clear space between us and a sub-investment-grade rating. But I'm not expecting any change in the rating off the back of this announcement.

[Operator Instructions] And we'll now take our next question from Steven Liechti of Deutsche Numis.

Apologies if some of this is repetition because I keep dropping in and out. First question is just to zero in on your comments on trading in the Middle East. You referenced a healthy revenue number. Anything you can give us there in terms of more detail and re-book rates, if appropriate? That's the first question. Second question, again, apologies if you talked about this, but it looks like the growth rate of Clarion is actually higher on an organic basis than Informa. Just in terms of the key drivers there, whether it be by vertical or region?

And then the third one was -- and you kind of alluded to this in what I heard earlier on. But just in terms of Trade Press, did suggest that there was a process, a full process about a year, 18 months ago, which didn't follow through. Just in terms of -- from your perspective, what happened there, and where you are and have got to today would be very helpful.

Thanks, Steve. If I can remember those 3. Middle East Trading and rebooking. -- yes, look, Middle East Trading, we're back. We actually just did a launch event in Abu Dhabi 2 weeks ago, LiveX, which from scratch was north of -- well, it was a very, very successful event. I won't quote the actual number. I just stop myself. Rebooking is happening at comparable rates. Forward-paying is a little muted by comparison to historically. So you can see a little bit of caution in the forward-market, but we'll see how that plays out. And then we've got a full schedule of major brands in October through November into December.

There's still noise and occasional flare-ups in parts of the region that is on almost any level undesirable. But on the ground, our teams are very focused, very resilient and are really doing an outstanding job. Clarion and their growth rate higher than ours, they're doing better than us, which is good. It goes back to the earlier question. We can learn from them. I think there are some peculiarities. They don't have an EMEA kind of pause and slight drag year-on-year because they already have a business in that part of the world.

They're getting a Super-Growth performance out of a couple of their categories, which are really doing well. Kudos to them for being in the right place at the right time, and indeed, taking the opportunity. I don't think there's any material difference in how they're going to market versus us. I think there are some things we can learn in the way in which they are doing some of their launch activity and, indeed, some of their work on pricing and yield management. But it's not universally the case; it is in aggregate. And I think, as I said earlier, the combination will be good. On the prior process, I mean that's for Blackstone to speak to if they choose to, Steve.

That's not quite how they would describe it. It's not quite how we would describe it. We looked at Clarion at that point in time. We had conversations with Blackstone. It quite suited us that it didn't complete because we weren't really ready to do anything at that point. We've kind of drawn stumps on acquisitions to focus on the successful integration of Ascential, the delivery of the revenue and cost synergies there, which we've done. But it's allowed us to make re-up contact, stay in touch, track what happened. And then we were pleased to be able to restart the conversation in the summer of this year.

With no further questions from the line. I will now hand it back to Stephen Carter.

Well, thank you very much. I appreciate the questions. I appreciate the interest, and I look forward to the one-on-one conversations we'll have through the day with shareholders and analysts. But for now, back to the day.

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 you 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 reminds -- this is designed just to remind us why we're in the markets we're in. These are the 2 markets we operate in as a business, B2B Live Events and Specialist Knowledge. I just wanted to pick out 2 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 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 live for those of us who did watch the World Cup with enthusiasm. Live events in sport and 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 2 pretty good neighborhoods. And so how good is the house? If we're in 2 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. I would -- 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 our customers.

Many years back, we wrote down after an intensive internal work exercise, 3 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 Americas 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 EMEA. 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 5 brands on there that we owned when we started out on this journey as a company. And if I went through each of those 5. Anti-aging today is 12x what it was back then. SuperReturn today is 22x in revenue, what it was back then. Monaco Yacht Show 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, if you just take these brands that have run in the first half of the year, Cannes Lions, which some of you were at, WHX, which some of you were at, Natural Products Expo, which some of you are at, Money20/20 in Europe, which some of you were at CPHI in China, which I suspect a few of you are at London Tech Week actually, which has been a lovely brand that we bought out of administration and turned into a real thing and SuperReturn, which literally lived up to its name. It was super and the returns were okay.

And if you added that up, that's nearly $1 billion 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 6 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 is 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 in -- 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% at 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 performance at the half year for our dividend-orientated shareholders.

In B2B 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 net, 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, these are -- 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 out 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 serving us 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 outperformance 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 3 years or 5 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 5 years, for 10 years, for 15 years, for 20 years. That's where the real long-term value is. And to do that, you need to look after your brands 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, providing -- 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 is 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 what's happening in Nigeria, which is completely different 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 7 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 flavor. The first 2 events of the taxi rank for us in the second half of the year, in region are Middle East Energy in Dubai, at 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 strides, strong underlying growth in the first year, just over 5%. Some of that is phasing, some of that's prebooking. 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% to 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, about 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 in geo expansion, a bit like we did in B2B, and we were a little bit cautious in 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. It's 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 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 product, more 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, to maybe reshape the culture a bit, the culture is very strong in 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, Informa TechTarget, shades of British Rail for those of you who are 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 U.S. 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 multilayered combination.

Put all of that in the operational blender, you end up at minus 1% rather than plus 6%. And that differential in revenue terms actually is about $30 million to $50 million of revenue. It's not a mountain that we can't climb but it's $30 million to $50 million of revenue that's in the wrong place.

The growth rates are leveling out, all the negative growth rates are leveling 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 will be going on inside the company next year and the year after. If you go back to my brand slide, if the battery is now working, which it is, when you go from 3 or 4 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 learned to run before we could 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 Informa. What do we do in order to provide platform capability, system ability 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 Informa will give us a better bedrock to further enhance the front office performance.

In summary, this is where we are. The One Informa 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, have never dropped 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 buyback.

Our B2B Live Events business is our biggest engine, so it needs to grow at the fastest rate. The market is 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 T&F to be a reliable 5% plus growth business, so it's not a drag on our growth ambition. It's getting there. TechTarget. 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 and 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 2 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 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, 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 is so tricky to get to. And it's -- I think I'm correct in saying our single biggest brand is the meeting place for that industry, which right now is a real feature of innovation and new product, and it's a really great way to see what we do live.

That's where we will throw down to questions.

Who would like to go first? We could 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 is [indiscernible].

Annick Maas from Bernstein. I think My 3 questions are for Gareth, sorry. The first 1 is on T&F and the Anthropic court case that was settled with publishers. I think depending on the assumptions you take, you will benefit from 25 million 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 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, et cetera.

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, at the moment, I don't think it will be revenue. I think it's a settlement number.

So we don't change our full year revenue outlook for Taylor & Francis. But as Stephen has mentioned, we're confident about an improving performance in the business on a full year basis in '26 versus a full year basis in '25 regardless of that.

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 decide to not stay in this year and move into next and vice versa, if they all go, does that mean you have revenue upside or downside to your guidance for this year?

We've accounted for what we know at the moment in terms of our potential revenue deferrals. I mean you're right, there is some revenue deferral from existing customers. 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 '27. But on the other hand, we're also still working hard to identify opportunities and there are 1 or 2 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 where we think could come to fruition. So.

We're still working hard to maximize the '26 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 in the release, does that mean that China is now growing? Or what...

China is performing as we thought it would at the start of the year. We never needed a big uptick in the 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, 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 lower than it's done historically as in going back a couple of years, but consistent with where it was, say, in 2025.

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 '27? 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 shows 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 3% to 4% on average about the right ballpark?

Everywhere or in the Middle East?

Everywhere.

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 2% to 3% than 3% to 4%, but it might vary depending on where you are in the world. If you're just thinking 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's, It's just slight -- H1 is I think it's slightly ahead of where we were this time last year.

I don't know, to be honest. I don't -- but I -- 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, close brackets, but not a visible one.

What was your other question?

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

Look, there 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, we've got an event coming in Abu Dhabi, I think, on the 29th, 29th of September LIVEX, which is a investment livability Summit. I think we've got 20,000 attendees, registered about 50 exhibitors. Last time I looked at it, we got 50 country participants. 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 that 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 roll over into '27, which actually should help '27 numbers, where you need to, and net, that should end up being an outcome we can all live with.

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 the CMD. Secondly, you called out sort of further looking at other licensing deals for data in Taylor & Francis. Just wondering if you could provide some more color 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 sort on your first question, just unpack that a bit for me.

And I think part of the thesis was that there was a lot of supply that was coming online, particularly in Dubai and. Yes.

Do you want to take the margin question? Do you want me to answer the first 2 first ? I'll try that.

We can time how long it takes the finance director 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 supply, 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 too much -- we would have the view we could fill 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 -- 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 on utilization, of which what we do for a living is a big part of it.

So you see -- in other words, in order to finance additional supply, what underpins that is a belief in incremental demand. So the 2 are, as you would expect, fellow travelers. So I don't think there's anything that's materially changed in our confidence.

On AI deals, yes, we're in discussion with -- 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 time lines. We haven't signed any but 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 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 to your question is that we're 2 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 both 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 for 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.

It's Ciaran Donnelly from Citi. A few more from me, again, on EMEA. I'm just going to ask directly. Do you want to give us the assumptions for H2 and EMEA to get to the 7% guide for the B2B Events portfolio? If you're not going to give that number, could you just give us an insight into how Middle East Energy LEAP and Money20/20 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 inD. I'm interested with everything that's gone on in the region. Has anything changed this year in terms of 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. .

I think I'm sort of try and answer your question by giving you some context. I'm not at all casual, I believe you may, 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. And 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, Matti, on last week. And the 2 of them are knee-deep in working out what the 3-year plan numbers are going to be for '27, '28, '29.

We had a launch event for the joint venture 2 or 3 weeks ago. We had about 1,000 people altogether. I mean, to Gareth's point, we're all systems go, all systems in, all market focused. So there's nothing that's changed.

Your first 2 questions are easier to answer. No and no. And why? Because sort of if we started giving brand-by-brand event by event ,pacing by pacing, day by day, and we wouldn't be doing an investor presentation, we'd be having a sales ops 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 are clearly -- there's clearly dislocation in the market. Where are we seeing that dislocation as a negative we're seeing 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 0. 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 intra-regional suppliers and intra-regional exhibitors.

The Saudi Arabia 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 will be a different mix.

Money20/20 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. And on top of that, we're bringing new product to market. LIVEX will be a completely new product. It wasn't in the plan, wasn't in the budget wasn't in the market. and singularly focused on livability and investment in region. And actually, that's very attractive. And I think might end up at 20,000, 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.

It's Nick Dempsey from Barclays. I've got 2 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 in the AGM?

And the second question, Taylor & Francis is performing pretty well now, and you're talking about it being 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 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 Gulfood, because again, to go back to the answer to Ciaran's question, 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 times over many years. 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 a 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 centers 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 of 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.

So a question in the front here. And then, Nick, could you just pass the -- we've only got 1 mic. Here, in here.

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 referred to a third party is appraising maybe at a slightly greater AI risk. I just wondered with respect to those or indeed any others, if you could give any color about whether you're actually seeing some of those end industries, I think media, financial services were, 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 eTextbooks are dragging, is it that there's just more slot 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?

Great questions. My -- if you want my thought for the day, half year reflections, which executive colleagues are here have heard me say in being around our end markets in the first 6 months of the year. This is not very revelatory. AI is everywhere in all of our events. I've been 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 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 presence of it and its application to either workflow improvement or process improvement or speed to market, it's 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 it 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, time lines 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 and foundation AI gets all the headlines, but the whole series of AI sub-layers, which are really featured in our -- in many of our events.

So net, I think positive. It's a bit relevant to your T&F question because I think 1 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 slot word before.

How do we retain all those benefits and compress the time line because you're absolutely right, the volume in to the value out, I mean to an independent observer of this business activity, it doesn't add up. And believing me, we're very alive to that. And it's a bit back to the earlier question from Nick. One of the things we believe we can do is use machine intelligence and process -- significant process improvement to increase that flow without, in any way, shape or form decreasing the quality.

To your very specific points, emission 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. It's an interesting area, very interesting area for us.

Question just here. Rich, are you getting questions from online?

Steven Liechti from Deutsche Numis. Yes, just 3, I guess. One is on general trading, RELX 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 or any specific areas of weakness relative to your peers and competitors?

Secondly, my working assumption is Saudi is pretty underweight U.S. 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 U.S. and Western revenue, let's say, overall?

And then last question is just on T&F. We kind of talked to the CMD about the midterm target to increase almost direct digital deals that aren't one-off L&M training, but more subscription-type models. Can you just give us an update on how that's developing overall.

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

Yes. So the last question is on T&F. At the CMD, one are of the drivers in the midterm to get to 5% was doing almost longer-term digital AI type deals for data as opposed to training LLM, 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 events [indiscernible]. But we haven't seen anything structural outside of the much discussed situation in the UAE and KSA and in the Middle East. I think your working assumption on KSA is broadly right. Although just to restate what I said earlier. It is also the case that partly because of what's happened in 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 U.S. 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.

In the UAE, it so varies. I mean, I'll give you 2 examples. LIVEX and Middle East Comic Con will be like 100% 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. The UAE economy and expatory 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 T&F, Yes. It's part of the reason we just brought in a new lady to who just joined us from Wolters Kluwer to run our corporate and prosumer business inside T&F 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.

There could be -- we do it already in licensing, quite well actually. But those tend to be licensing deals but to existing customers, if you see what I mean, 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 that I often say are the work of the devil. A percentage point of growth is GBP 6 million worth of revenue. So 2 percentage points of growth is GBP 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 format, 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 platform that can naturally work with a workflow for a corporate that employs 3,000 research scientists in America, there were 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 early 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 people who joined us on the live stream, thank you very much, and we look forward to seeing you in November at our IMS. Thanks.

Okay. I think we're -- are we live yet? 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 a 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 of 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 macro economist, 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 Informa 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 clue is 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 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 2 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 and 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 is 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.

We've -- 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 a 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 it in simple form. 75% of the business is now our B2B Live Events business. Put that in numbers, GBP 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 proportionately, it 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 U.K. 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, it's 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 the cost that's gone up in the last 2 to 3 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 1/5 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. 10 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.

EMEA, 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 prebooking is higher, the rebooking is higher. If you could buy this as a stand-alone 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, and 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, 3 of them have already traded, and they traded extremely well at the beginning of the year, WHX, WHX Labs and Gulfood. 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 is 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 2 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 6 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 from 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 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 time next year, it will 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 of 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 IIRIS. 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 live 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, well, what about -- 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.

So 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, product 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 GBP 4 billion is about GBP 120 million to GBP 130 million a year of compound investment in capability.

This is a capital -- this is a light capital intensity business. But nevertheless, at those levels, if you do it for 5 years, 6 years, 7 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 inorganically, but we've been out of the acquisition market now for over 2 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 $1 billion 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 handing the mic? Can we -- just in the front -- in the second row just here, please?

Annick Maas from Bernstein. It's great to see that you've been so proactive in the Middle East. My question is, what does the 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 Eastern shows is less local than in other geographies globally. And then thirdly, I remember that Halal had like 2 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?

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 are being asked and answered. Do we think that's going to happen? No. What's our experience of when you close, rephase and restart. Well, I remember during COVID, when we were doing -- right in the heart of it, we're 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.

A couple of billion, I think.

Yes, a lot. That's a big number. How much of that would be demanded as rebates? I think we ended up through the entirety of COVID rebating $50 million. I mean, I don't think that's really the issue. I think the issue is your last question. And my own view on that, and obviously, you have to filter my bias is there's a reason why to use Halal as an example, there is a reason why that part of the world has become a mercantile trading hub is because it's very, very good at doing it. The fundamentals of why that's the case, that's not going away anytime soon.

Will Larwood from Berenberg. Firstly, obviously, rescheduled the events to the latter part of the year. What impact does that necessarily have on the scheduling for 2027?

The second is just if you can confirm in the Middle East between September, those shows running between September and December, how much has already been booked? And then you mentioned that there's sort of 20 different brand extensions, new launches planned in 2026. Could you just provide us with a little bit of flavor about where those are geographically?

Good question. On the scheduling, generally, we feel confident. I mean, in an ideal world, you want -- in an ideal world, you want 12 months gap. And by definition, it's unlikely we'll have that although we might for some actually, maybe 3 or 4 of them because we might reschedule period. In fact, we just had an exchange on one of those today. But we move very quickly. And therefore, we're generally -- we've had that in our mind when we were rescheduling for '26, how much of a sales cycle do you need for '27.

Now I don't want to say I think it will have 0 impact because in another year's time, I'm going to be standing up here telling you it had a bit of an impact. But do I think it's material? No, I don't. And really, the answer to your question is that was firmly in our thought process when we were negotiating for rescheduling dates. So we've been alive to that. It's a good question though.

On the Middle East, September to December, what was your second question?

Just how much has been already booked?

Pretty much in line with our average, so sort of 50%, 60%. And really to the prior question, right now, the issue for us is not, I don't think attendance and cancellation. I really don't. It will be -- the real issue, if there is an issue is will it happen? And that's a judgment that we can all make our own judgment on. What we've done is made sensible decisions about how much time do we want to buy to allow ourselves a high probability that, that will happen. And then the extensions, almost none of those are affected in the affected areas. So that it's not relevant to that.

Steve Liechti from Deutsche Numis. Just on Middle East, just remind us in terms of rescheduling towards the, let's call it, the fourth quarter, venue capacity. Obviously, there's been a lot of space come on. Just give us some sort of confirmation that the space is there and usable.

Then maybe just shifting across to guidance for this year. what are your underlying assumptions for the U.S. and China events because both of those probably lagged relative to the portfolio last year. Can we expect those to pick up within your guidance?

And then finally, you kind of touched on it, but your -- what is your appetite for M&A now given macros are quite tough and your share price where it is, are you thinking about reallocating your kind of mental map towards share buybacks rather than M&A on a kind of 12-month view?

Great questions. I mean my -- as you were going through them, Steve, my thought was better lucky than good. So you're right. There is additional capacity, better lucky than good. You're right, the U.S. and China comps, '25 and '26 are lower, and therefore, we should see an uptick, better lucky than good. And on M&A versus share buybacks, well, the price has come off and our cash flows are strong, better lucky than good.

So that's kind of how we think about it. I mean we have been fast on relocation. And so again, a little bit like COVID, if you make the decision early, then you're more likely to be able to secure the capacity you want and to the prior question at the date slot that you want. And that has allowed us to do that. We are also a very big customer in that part of the world, and that also is beneficial. So I would say speed and size and the point you make, which is a very valid one, that there is significant additional capacity. Put that together, it's given us more flexibility than if this sad situation had occurred in another place or at another time.

On the U.S. and China, we expect the U.S. to be strong. And indeed, we are seeing that. It's March, we traded 6 scale events in the U.S. and all have done extremely well. So -- and similarly with China, partly because China was pretty anemic in our numbers last year. So therefore, the comp is low. So we think there's some upside in China and the U.S. And then if I'm allowed, I think I'm correct in saying that you were one of the people who said to me after the Capital Markets Day, come on, you can do better than 5% plus. And so our ability to be able to hold our guidance is partly because we've got confidence in the business more broadly.

Behind. And then I think we'll take a question online if there's anyone on the live stream.

It's Nick Dempsey from Barclays. I do have one question on the Middle East and a couple that aren't. So just first of all, we can see from looking at post-show reports, et cetera, what proportion of attendees at Middle East shows are from different geographies, very low from the U.S. and Europe. What about exhibitors. Are you similarly weighted in exhibitors to the region as opposed to people having to travel from further away?

Second question, John Wiley announced recently they'd licensed their journals to Open Evidence for use in clinical information. You guys have done book content, but as far as I know, not journal content yet. Is there another leg for more money to be gained from journal licensing to perhaps niche start-ups like Open Evidence for Taylor & Francis.

The third question, so we talked after Steve's question about the U.S. market. It looks as though the market as a whole was kind of flat to slightly up in 2025. You guys have clearly done better than that. Can you talk about what was driving that? Is there anything structurally changing in the U.S. market, which has made it underperform macro even though you guys did better.

Do you want to take the John Wiley licensing question? I'll come in on the Middle East attendees and then maybe we can both express a view on the U.S. market.

On the Middle East, yes is the short answer. The attendees are -- sorry, the exhibitors are slightly more diversified than the attendees, as you would expect. There's a significant proportion from China and Southeast Asia, Turkey, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, actually, more than you might imagine from Europe, particularly from Germany, France, Italy, depending upon the category, the brand. Some from the U.S., but actually not material.

But it is a more diverse exhibitor, if you like, geographic and sort of pie chart, Nick, than for the attendees. Our experience -- and look, you know this industry possibly better than I do, and you certainly know our company well. Maybe I know our company a bit better than you. One of the things that we've observed is exhibitors are very robust. So you get much less flux on exhibitors when you're in a situation where something happens, whether it's kind of weather or terrorism or illness or conflict than you do from attendees. And that's part of what gives us confidence as well. But it's an interesting question.

On academic and licensing, do you want to comment?

Yes. We've talked consistently about the results, excluding licensing. So I think that's worth just touching on 3.6% growth, excluding nonrecurring deals in '25 and targeting 4% in '26 from that source. So that's the first cab off the rank, if you like, in management meetings that we're really focusing on is how is the underlying trading of the business doing absent deals.

We will continue to look for deals that are in the market and there are negotiations ongoing all the time for follow-on deals, either in the space that we have so far monetized or other areas like journals that we haven't yet monetized. We'll report those to the market as we do them rather than speculate about what we might do in the future. But it's something we're targeting and looking at on the right terms with the right protections in place to try and drive extra revenue. But nothing to report at this stage in terms of '26 going forward.

The U.S.? Why did we do better than the average and anything in particular?

Yes. I mean I think in the U.S., we've got a mix of brands there. There are 1 or 2 areas that are tougher in the U.S., areas like battery and solar, where they are seeing more government regulation or less government support than they saw a couple of years ago.

Those areas in 2025 were a challenge. But on the whole, the portfolio of brands we got there is very strong. We've got good relationships again with big venue and venue locations like Las Vegas, and that enables us to operate at scale on good terms in terms of venues and getting the right dates and the calendar, et cetera. So those are things are the majority of the portfolio of the shows have enabled us to perform well across the U.S. market. As Stephen said to an earlier answer, because the portfolio has been purposely built over time, we've really focused on areas in markets like the U.S. that we think we will be seeing structural growth over the short and medium term. So we really benefited from that in terms of we're actually delivering in the growth of the shows in the U.S.

I would also say, and I can say this is because it's at the back of the room, if I don't say it, he'll tell me off. I think the business has benefited from having Patrick Martell based out of the U.S. and Gary Nugent based out of the U.S. and Andy Mullins spending more and more time in the U.S. So putting the management where the market is, putting the management where the trading is done, I think, has served us well. We've got a bit closer to the brands, a bit closer to the markets, a bit closer to the product. And that's sort of generally true across the business. And I think that has definitely sharpened our operating performance in markets. An interesting question.

I'm going to go to the live stream, if I may. Are there any questions on the live stream. Who's the live stream person?

I've got one online just come through from Jonathan Barrett at Panmure, who has asked, would we consider using capital to secure the remainder of TechTarget?

Do you want to take that, Gareth? That's a great question, by the way.

It is, yes. Very good.

I thought so.

Look, I think as we said in the -- what Stephen said in the presentation, really the focus at the moment is on '26 being growth for the full year. As what you can see from the numbers how the numbers have evolved across '25. By the end of '25, we're in growth. So either in all our numbers, you can see it in the full year versus the 10-month the TechTarget numbers, you can see it in the Q4, the business was back in growth at the end of the year.

Now it's about delivering growth across the whole of the year on a consistent and sustainable basis for the year. That's really got to be the focus. We bought that business to be a growth engine, and we've got to get it back into consistent growth. If we deliver that, then we'll look at capital structure options, capital deployment options at the end of the year when we're back in growth. But really, the focus at the moment is 100% on delivering growth in that business.

Absolutely. Questions on this side? Who's got the mic? You've got the mic. Go for it.

It's Ciaran Donnelly from Citi. A couple of questions. I guess just in the scenario where it is a protracted disruption to the Middle East business and those Q4 events come into scope, could you help us understand in terms of the time line ahead of those schedules where you would potentially make a decision to cancel or move again.

I guess you've maintained that April date for LEAP. Is that indicative of how you would approach it time line-wise? And I guess, could you just help us understand costs incurred increase as you get closer and closer to the event. So what's that relationship between time ahead of the event and costs incurred being decreased. And then just on LLM deals, I guess the view is that data is becoming increasingly valuable. So in terms of timing a deal potentially with the general LLMs, how do you think about waiting out for potentially a better price as your data becomes increasingly valuable.

Good questions. I'll take the first. Maybe Gareth come in on the second, and I will as well. I mean you're 100% right. The closer you get by definition to the date, then you're incurring more and more fixed costs, both marketing costs, but often product and in some cases, build cost. What's our view.

Our view is that the situation is evolving hourly, daily. I mean, I'm sure everyone on the live stream and here knows it. I mean, in the affected areas, I mean, where our offices are open. We've got hundreds of people in the offices, people are working. I think in the last 3 days, there were over 150,000 passengers who came in and out of Dubai by plane. So it's not static. And the authorities there have done an outstanding job of control, clarity, communication and safety and security. So the judgment we've made is that our rescheduling on the balance of judgment is going to give us enough time not to bump into that.

If we did bump into that, what would the options be? I think the options would be either don't run partly to the earlier question because then what you do is you're giving yourself a bigger problem for '27 or to put that positively, don't run because actually you can reap a bigger return in '27. And we know that because we saw that in COVID. And so there's a kind of market by market, case by case, when do you choose to take the revenue, if you want to put it really crudely.

Second option is run, but don't run in that location because not all of the brands are location specific. Some of them aren't. So I think we have choices. That's really my point. We have time. We are sensibly husbanding our current fixed cost expenditure, as you would expect, focusing on customer and customer management. That's really time rather than cost. And then I think we'll be able to make a judgment. So I'm quietly confident it will be fine.

And just on LLM deals?

LLM deals, holding out on price. I mean there's sort of a market price that's emerged for data. I mean it slightly depends upon what the data is. That's what we found. A bit to the earlier question, we haven't used our -- if you're talking about academic, you're talking about academic, you're talking data more broadly. You're talking about academic? We've contained our commercial conversations to reference data or data that comes out of our reference business rather than data that comes out of our research and journals business so far. But by and large, there's sort of a market price, but I don't know. Gareth, you got anything you want to add to that?

No, I think as I said earlier, I mean it's a market that we will do deals on the right terms if we can get them. We're not in a rush to do deals on the wrong terms as you'd expect. And therefore, we're sort of in the market and looking at options there, but we will update as things close and as we see opportunities actually come to fruition.

Two questions here in the second row.

It's George Webb here from Morgan Stanley. I guess first question, still back on the Middle East, I'm afraid. I assume I'm not asking you to be a war analyst because I think it's very difficult to predict what's happening here. But certainly, as it looks today, it feels like the dynamics in the UAE and Saudi Arabia are slightly different. I'm kind of curious if this was still the dynamic in 3 months' time, 4 months' time, and we're not 2 weeks into the war, how you would feel this might shake out between running events in Saudi Arabia versus the UAE, not in terms of shifting, but in terms of actually how it feels potentially on the ground there, how the partners are reacting, that would be interesting to hear.

And then maybe one for you, Gareth, just on free cash flow dynamics for 2026. It was good working capital result in '25 in the base. Are there any kind of puts and takes we should be thinking about with regards to the potential pace of free cash flow growth this year?

Do you want to take free cash flow first, '26?

Yes, I mean, the first thing, I think just to double the call as you touched on, a very strong result in '25 in terms of free cash flow, getting close to GBP 900 million worth of free cash flow in the year to over $1 billion, certainly the most free cash flow we've ever delivered in a year, reflecting the scale of the business and a good strong performance in the working capital in '25.

We're looking to repeat that in '26, growing a bit year-on-year. It will probably grow more in line with where OP growth is in '26 rather than another year of strong growth in the year, but definitely looking to set up for that sort of similar mid-single-digit percentage increase year-on-year in '26. And then that gives us the capital allocation opportunity to do things like accelerate the buybacks that we've announced this morning because we have that confidence and visibility over the free cash flow number and our ability to generate good conversion again in '26, which is what enables us to step up the buybacks at this stage of the year.

I'm going to skip your question, if I may, for reasons that you all understand in that we are partners in both of the markets that you described, and therefore, we're committed to both. I mean, by definition, they're different. I mean, not least one is probably 4x the population, the domestic population than the other.

So the dynamics in the market are different. But in both markets, our offices are open. In both markets, we're working with the authorities. In both markets, we've had very helpful discussions around scheduling and planning. In both markets, we're in a partnership. And so we are -- we have a deep understanding of what might happen, how it might happen and when it might happen. So I think we're about as well placed as one could want to be. And I have to say in both markets, I've been incredibly impressed by what they don't say in that part of the world, which is the song in which they have dealt with it and the efficiency and the clarity of communication. But the fundamentals of those markets will remain very strong, very strong.

It's James Tate from Goldman Sachs. I guess, firstly, at the CMD, you talked about the opportunities to better utilize attendee pricing. So could you give an update on the rollout of attendee pricing across the portfolio? Has it been rolled out and introduced to most informal markets events now? And how should we think about the contribution from this attendee pricing to growth this year and beyond? Secondly, just on margins for B2B markets. Could you help walk us through some of the moving parts of 2026. You've obviously got the biennials coming out, maybe some headwinds from the rescheduling. Is there anything to be aware of in terms of reinvestment into the business? And putting it all together, can margins still grow year-on-year this year?

Great questions. I mean all of those questions come to the same point, which is if you make the product better, then you can do more things with it. So slightly to the earlier question about what's behind the performance of our brands and our businesses in the North American market or indeed in any market in the world is the higher the quality of the offer, then the different -- you're having a different conversation with your customers.

It's very difficult to charge anyone an entry price, a ticket price for something they don't want to go to. It's a lot easier to charge them a higher price for something they really want to go to. I mean I know this is pretty obvious. But historically, it was an article of faith that you couldn't charge anyone to attend a trade show. What we found is, well, you actually can. But to do that, you have to invest in the product.

So to your investment question, investment in the product is built into the model. And if you get that investment right and initially, we started in certain brands at certain locations, and we are rolling that out more broadly. What you then discover, that actually you can make the product better and customers are willing to pay for it. And then you get to a question of where do you take that? Do you take that on yield on your space and rebooking packages? Or do you take it on attendee pricing. Or do you take it in different places or both. And it depends a bit on the end market. And we're learning our way into this brand by brand, category by category. Are we doing it everywhere? No. And that's a good thing because that gives us further runway on yield and price and value and mix, which is one of the steps of the so-called stairway to heaven.

Lead Insights. Lead Insights really is a child of IIRIS. And '25 was a kind of launch year, '26 is a scaling year, '27 will be a full year. So you'll see the revenues on Lead Insights step up year-on-year-on-year. But again, at its heart, you've got to start with data that provides a set of analytics and answers for buyers and sellers that they couldn't get with their own information.

If you can get that right, can you charge for it? Sure, you can charge for it. It requires a bit of retraining of your sales force. And in some cases, it requires a new sales force because it's relational selling and it's technical selling rather than space and capacity selling. But that's not impossible to do. It's not the work of a moment, but it's not impossible to do. But all of those, that's why I think they are great questions.

They're all an example of how you can layer more into the product and the service. And that layering gives you more richness. That richness gives you more yield, gives you more pricing confidence, gives you more products to sell and deepens your relationship with your customer. And as we know in many, many markets, what's the key to customer stickiness, bundling. If you have a single point transaction relationship with your customer, that's not as good as if you've got 2 or 3 or 4 or 5.

So not only does it grow our revenues, but it deepens our relationships with our customers. So it has multiple benefits. It's one of the fundamental reasons why we feel so strongly that what we've built has got much more long-term capability than even a nearly 10% year-on-year growth at high growing margins would illustrate.

I'm going to take one last question in the room and then if there's any more online, Rich.

I have a couple more on the LLMs. You mentioned that you're negotiating now and you're really thinking about protections from your point of view with regards to the LLMs. My first question is, I guess, for the LLM contract so far, it's about books and this book content cannot be shared as such, but it's going to be used to train the LLMs. How do you actually check whether the LLMs are not replicating this content? That's the first one.

And second one, have you learned from the previous LLM deals that you've done that you haven't protected yourself in the best way and you've took some learnings from this, which you are now aiming to implement in any potential future deal? Does that makes sense?

The second one -- it's not that we've learned. I think from the get-go, we've been quite careful about the controls that we've put in place around the deals. So it's not that we've kind of learned that we changed tech. It's just all the negotiations we followed a view of we're not just doing this for revenue now. We're doing this to protect the long-term IP of the business. So it's not that we've learned and changed. It's that we're just quite considerate about what we want to do with the area. It's great to monetize it, but we don't need to monetize it per se. So it's always got to be on the right terms.

Yes. I mean we took -- I mean, in a good way, and sometimes in a frustrating way, we took a long time on the contracts that we signed. I mean these were not sort of 1 day, 1 week or even 1-month discussions. We generally found the parties on the other side, very responsible. We can scan and check to your very specific question, and we've seen no evidence or anything else in all those contracts.

It is absolutely clear that there is no reproduction rights. There were no citation rights. There are no contiguous -- there are limits on contiguous word reproduction and there are no commercial rights in any country in the world. So it would be a blatant breach of a contract.

But fundamentally, we weren't really dealing with people who were interested in the data. They weren't really interested in the format. They're interested in the data for other reasons. So did we learn -- and the other thing that was interesting was they were all different. So it wasn't like it was cut and paste. They were all really very different because they had different motivations. But so far, touch wood, I think, as Gareth says, we were very thoughtful, and we haven't as yet discovered there was something we missed and should have put in. But we always live slightly paranoid.

Rich, anything else online?

Okay. I'll just finish if we could just flick up the last slide. Last year, we had a number of investor engagement opportunities. There's only going to be 2 in 2026, one in the Americas in Chicago, actually our oldest show by age, the National Restaurant Show, fantastic show. You don't need to like food, but if you do, you'll particularly love it.

It's a very live dynamic show. The restaurant market is a fabulous market. This is the hallmark show for the restaurant industry, the restaurant supply chain, you can imagine how fragmented and diverse that supply chain is. And that's in Chicago in May. If you're interested in coming, please do indicate.

And then towards the back end of the year, a brand that really has become a case study for pretty much everything we do. Syndication, we now have 12 CPHIs globally, Lead Insights, fully integrated, attendee pricing, fully integrated, material increase in yield. It's our largest event, single event by revenue and by scale. It's growing at north of 10% a year compound. And it spans the entirety of the pharmaceutical value chain from ideation all the way through to licensing, patent registration, packaging and production. It's a phenomenon. And that's in Europe in Milan in October. So you've got 2 very different shows, 2 different geographies in 2 different parts of the world. If you're interested in attending, then please do indicate to Mitesh and Richard.

Beyond that, if I'd like to thank everyone on the live stream, I can see the numbers. We had a lot of people who set aside some time to join us. Thank you very much for that. For those of you in the room, double thanks for personal presence and here's to smooth travels and some resolutions in those parts of the world where they're not in the sort of peaceful situation we are here today. Thank you very much.

Good afternoon, everybody, in the room. Welcome to Informa's 2025 Capital Markets Day. Hello also to everyone online. We've got a few hundred people joining us. I suspect it's good morning to most of them or an early good morning to others who are joining from America. But thank you very much for joining us. We're excited to be here. We have a packed agenda. see if I can first of all, say welcome to Dubai.

I know lots of you haven't been here before. Some of you have. But part of the idea of running this in Dubai was so everyone can feel the vibrancy of this amazing city, this amazing place and also just get a bit more understanding of how deep Informa has roots in Dubai and the wider region and the opportunities that, that's bringing us both today and in the future. So we've got 2 days.

Today is really a chance to talk and have conversations and hear from some of our leaders across the region, some of our partners. And then tomorrow, we're going to spend the day together at the Dubai Air Show, which is one of our biggest brands, one of our most dynamic brands.

I popped along yesterday to see them building it. It's a truly visual feast, and I'm sure we'll get a lot out of that tomorrow when we're there in person. It's quite a busy agenda for the afternoon. You'll see there's a theme, compounding growth. Growth has always been a theme for us, certainly since Stephen took over and led us.

And really, we think we're at a stage now where we can look forward and have some confidence about compounding the levels of growth that we're delivering and all the benefits that come with that. So we've got a series of presentations and conversations that speak to that theme from various different colleagues across the group.

Hopefully, you had a chance to sample if you're in the room, a few of our product demonstrations that were going on from across the group. If you didn't get a chance to do that, there's a break coming up a bit later, and we will run a sort of a mini session in all of them again. So don't be shy to jump down there and see if you can get involved.

Lots of themes coming through them. Data really at the core of most of them, whether that's LeadInsights products that you'll hear a little bit more about in the presentations today, a new product that we're really selling throughout our -- beginning to sell throughout our events businesses, whether it's about the AI dividend that we talk about and how we're leveraging data and Elysia inside our own business to speed up everything we do and drive efficiencies to spend more time on other things, whether it's to do with AI and how we're using that to really drive integrity in our research product in Taylor & Francis or just a pure data product, Informa TechTarget and how we're really using our data and technology to develop new lead generation products in that business.

So do get -- if you get a chance, go and drop in on some of those. But I don't want us to hold up. I want us to get straight into the agenda. We're very lucky for the first session that we've got some great guests with us. Very delighted to have His Excellence Helal Saeed Al Marri. Helal has more titles than most people, but he is Director General of the Economy & Tourism of Dubai. He's also Director General of the Dubai World Trade Center, who, of course, is a close partner of ours already, and we're trying to deepen that partnership.

Stephen, I hope you know, Stephen Carter, Informa's Group Chief Executive. If you don't, you might be in the wrong meeting, but don't worry. It will still be good. And we're very lucky that we have Thorold Barker with us today to moderate a conversation between Helal and Stephen. Thorold, you may well know from his time as Editor of the Lex column at the FT and also as the EMEA Editor of the Wall Street Journal.

So I'm going to hand over to you, Thorold, and please take it away.

Thank you very much indeed, and welcome, everybody. So I wanted to start. There's obviously this very exciting opportunity of bringing together the businesses here in Dubai. But I want to start, Stephen, with you quickly. Just can you give a sense of where this all began and sort of why this was so attractive to you in the first place?

I won't allow me to have a different regulation, so he can keep me honest. But it really -- for me, at least, it all started in Dubai because it all started in Dubai, and therefore, that's why we're -- has led us to here.

When I was given the opportunity to run Informa, my predecessor, who Helal knew pretty well, I would say, said to me, you need to get to know Helal. He runs -- owns and runs the best events business in the world, trade show business in the world. And indeed, there have been prior discussions between Peter and Helal about other opportunities.

So I came here in 2013, and I went to see Helal. I think I was only kept waiting 20 minutes before I got to see him. And I got a real sense even then for what was being done here in the trade show market. At the time, we'll talk about this a bit later.

At the time, Informa owned, I think, about 9 or 10 trade shows in the world, 11 if you include the Monaco Yacht Show as a trade show, which it isn't really. It's a different animal. And we decided then at Informa that we would separate out our, at the time, relatively small trade show portfolio into a separate operating business, and we would see whether or not we could really become a player in this market. And as a signal of our ambition, we called this business global exhibitions, even though we only had 8 of them. So we had a sense of where we were going to go.

Over the years, I've been in and out of Dubai a lot. Our business here has got bigger and bolder and it has become more and more of a center, and Helal can talk much more knowledgeably and more passionately than I about how this has become more and more one of the world centers. And that led inevitably, I feel, to a conversation that he and I started over 1.5 years ago that maybe the way in which we could -- there was a mutual benefit was to put the businesses together and really create a scale business in the center of where the world is increasingly meeting. And that's what led us to where we are now.

And Helal what does it bring for you? I mean you've got these very -- and we'll get on to this in a minute, but these very serious ambitions for Dubai as a center for tourism and a center for events. Can you talk a little bit about what this brings to you in terms of turbocharging that?

Okay. So first of all, welcome to Dubai, everyone. I heard there's people -- it's their first time in Dubai, which is -- so I have to say welcome there. When Dubai -- when we look at Dubai's future and where Dubai is going, everything Dubai is doing is to build itself as a leading global city.

And back to the word global that was mentioned, it's important for us at the forefront of that is people coming and meeting, is talent being attracted to Dubai? Is the right business being conducted in Dubai? And the great thing about the trade business, trade show business and conferences and everything else is it really does bring together the best minds and it does bring together the trade across sectors. And as we started to look at that and as we've been growing, we do have leading shows.

Of course, you're going to see the air show tomorrow. It's definitely arguably the best air show in the world. Some weeks ago, we had the largest technology show in the world. In January, we will be opening our new venue, which I'll come back to in a second, with the largest food show in the world.

So as you start to look at where we're going with this business or the sector, for us is Dubai, it's really about having these global leading events that are must attend that actually get all the investment. And that was evident even through COVID because we were the first to come back to events and you had all these companies not doing events all over the world except Dubai. And so we're really looking to build on that.

Now one thing within that is what we're talking about here is our events business. As Dubai World Trade Center, we also have a venue business where we are working on doubling the size of the venue. The first phase of that gets delivered at the end of this year. So we'll have more than 50% extra capacity.

And then by the end of that year, we'll go to more 100% extra capacity. So of course, with this capacity, where we've been capacity constrained for a while, comes great growth opportunity here. And out of here, we've also seen the regional markets, whether it's Africa, Middle East, India, the whole sort of region is showing tremendous growth in terms of the underlying economies are doing well. The underlying economies are showing great signs of growth. And if you take a step back a little bit that ultimately, you have finance, you have trade and you have people. And Dubai is really at the center of that for that whole region. DP World controls most of the ports, most of the free ports and everything else in the wider region. Dubai International Finance centers, obviously, the financial center for the whole region.

And then most of the talent is -- most of those companies have a lot of their talent base in Dubai. So kind of -- there's this big opportunity for a much faster-growing area out of Dubai. And we looked at our businesses, I think, and we just saw that we are extremely strong in a number of sectors. And then in the sectors we don't have anything in, obviously, Informa is very, very strong.

And then with the convergence of technology and health care, for example, with the convergency of technology in aerospace, all these things happening, we just said if we brought it together, we're going to be able to multiply in terms of growth rates.

Stephen, does this mean that you are going to -- obviously, this is not just a deal that covers Dubai, it covers the broader region. Is this going to mean that your investment is further skewed towards Dubai because of these massive increases in capacity and other things. Is this going to really transform your business in terms of your focus vis-a-vis these other countries as well?

You mean the other countries in the region?

Correct.

Well, look, I mean, Helal puts it well. I mean it's -- our business thrives where you operate a nexus of buyers meet sellers, importers meet exporters, distributors meet wholesalers. That's the essence of the business. And Dubai has taken a long-standing world-leading position in that. And there's more capacity coming into this market. We have a significant portfolio of brands and sectors, some of which are here, but not all of which are here.

I'm not sure I'd use the word SKU. I don't think it's an either/or. I think it could be an and also because that isn't to say that there aren't other locations of the world which equally are looking to expand in other geographies, South America, Africa, Southeast Asia. But the time zone and location advantages of Dubai in this region are pretty unique. And as a nexus and a meeting point, I think there's a real opportunity to create something...

Yes, please.

I mean I can add to that because I think that as you go into each market, a lot of people see -- people often have the mindset of one market, right? So if you think about Africa, it's not one market, right?

And so the priority, for example, in Morocco when it comes to technology is very different than maybe the priority in Nigeria or the priority in Kenya. And so the show which is developed using our collective portfolio in that market and what is done with the stakeholders there, they become very different to each other.

And the bottom line is that whilst one is thinking maybe about capacity building, right, of the youth. And you will find lots of technology training providers, you'll find lots of companies that are innovating in that space at that show. The other one is thinking the other countries much more on infrastructure or health tech or, or, or.

And depending on the priorities in that particular period of time of the country, of the companies of the multinationals and the start-up ecosystem and unicorns and everything else, the shows could be developed in that way. And I would -- obviously, with my role and where I'm sitting, Dubai is the biggest opportunity, always.

But the ability to export that out of here to those markets with ease because of the relationship of the UAE with those markets, but also because of how the talent flows backwards and forwards, I think that's where the critical point is. And I don't think it's exactly as Stephen said, there's no or in this. If a pie is growing, then it's about us together grabbing more and more market share and riding that growth.

So really, this is the hub and then you will, in these other countries, have the offshoots that are more specific to those countries. If you look at brand Dubai, you're obviously in charge of tourism as well as the events business.

Can you talk a little bit more about the crossroads between East and West and Africa and just sort of how it really fits in and the nature of the people coming to events, the mix of people from around the world?

Look, I think it's changed over time. And if I look today, first of all, you start with Dubai itself, let's take a step back from the events industry. I mean the people that are coming here for business meetings in general, the multinationals that are based here.

And when I say multinationals, I don't necessarily mean U.K. or European or American multinationals, they might be Asian multinationals, Africa multinationals that are based here. They're really serving the world from here. And they're definitely serving the 6- to 8-hour flight path, right, if nothing else. A lot of them cover all emerging markets, a lot of them maybe cover -- so if a U.S. company would come to Dubai and then cover the world from Dubai, and they have international headquarters here.

So with that, we're seeing -- and again, on trade, definitely you've got the South-South trade. But you've also got people putting -- because of the resilience they're looking for in supply chain and everything else, people are putting hubs here as well.

Now if you jump to the exhibition business, with all of the -- you have effectively, if I split sort of trade shows in 2 very distinct types. You have one, which is what we might term a more classic trade show, which is probably not the air show, but it's more like a Gulfood, right, where you have tens of thousands of brands, a very large number of exhibitors and they're really just booking the revenues for the next 6 months or the next 9 months.

Because of the trade routes and because of how the global trade is here, those are growing really strong, and they're taking market share from other geographies. The second thing is you have something more like a Gitex, which is about technology or you have North Star, which is the largest start-up show in the world.

And because the innovation is happening in a much wider area here, and a lot of the research out a lot of the technology hubs and a lot of the investment from VCs and stuff is coming towards, you're getting the attention and you're getting tremendous growth in that area as well.

So -- but again, what I want to reiterate just on that point is it's not just Dubai because a lot of these other markets, if you look at India, if you look at Saudi, if you look at some -- definitely a number of countries in Africa, CIS, other places there you're seeing tremendous potential and each one is sort of carving out its own niche, which supports that.

How do you see Dubai versus the other centers? I mean what's special here that really makes it different than the competitor hubs around the world.

The competitor hubs. Well, I was looking up my favorite answer engine the other day, how many cities are there in the world with populations of more than 3 million or 4 million? And if my answer engine is correct, which, of course, it might be, but might not be 100% correct, the answer is about 350.

If you look at it from a B2B point of view in the way in which Helal describes it, I mean, where is Dubai in that list? Top 5, probably, top 3 for B2B, I mean, that's quite something because there are a lot of cities in the world. You look up how many of those cities have got convention centers. Convention centers, 1,500. Convention centers with more than 50,000 square meters, actually more than you think, 300 or 400. So it's a competitive market. So where does Dubai rank? Dubai ranks very, very highly. But I would echo Helal's broader point about the geography here, and we are seeing that. I mean you'll hear later or the people in the room will hear later from Yogesh, who runs our business in India, from Atilla who runs our business in Turkey, from Annabelle, who co-runs our business in Saudi Arabia.

The region more broadly, then you go down into Africa. And you're absolutely right. You very rarely meet someone who introduced themselves says, I'm an African. There might be Kenyan or there might be Nigerian, but they're not -- and each of these are very distinctive markets. One of the things we have found has been a path to success as our company has grown is you have to own the brands. You have to have increasingly service technology. You definitely need good data. But what you also need is you need talent in the market that knows how to adapt the brand to the market. And we bring that in many markets. That's a big advantage.

I mean just on Dubai, I can give a few more anecdotes about Dubai, which I think will resonate. I mean, right now, Dubai is developing the largest airport in the world, right near the airshow where you're going to go and visit tomorrow.

Over GBP 150 billion is being invested in that. It's on track. It will be delivered by end of '32. The number of planes Emirates Airline has coming as well. I think that's all public information you can see.

But if you look at the infrastructure around the industry, I'm not talking about the exhibition centers and how much we're building or the IP that we're looking to import to bring in and everything else. If you just look at what's supporting that in terms of 60,000 more hotel rooms coming, all different things, you have that consistent growth, which allows you to grow. And it's there and it's already committed and the track record is there of it being delivered year after year after year.

That's why I think we're excited here. And a lot of the customers that we get here are also interested in those other markets. So when you're going to a show, this is very technical now, probably diving too deep in terms of how the shows work. But if you're going to go and do a show in that market, you know you've already got 50%, 60% of the shows sold from your existing customers that are here in Dubai, and they want to go into those markets with you. And so it kind of follows. So you're not having to reinvent any wheel, you're not having to do anything else. And then obviously, the cost of investment is much less. And so it works well when you're trying to drive bottom line growth.

So when we -- you talk about the regional hub and the infrastructure to bring in people, the airport, the time zone, obviously very good, the regional hubs of businesses and then this reputation and this brand for being a good place to come and do business in this form.

Can you talk a little bit about -- before we came on stage, we were talking about -- I've not been here for 5 years and how much has changed. Can you just talk a little bit about 10 years out, what is your vision for how all of these things fit together and how big this can get? Can you give your sort of show, like...

Sure. I mean, you're talking about the Exhibition business, you're talking about generally?

Well, the Exhibition business, but within the broader frame.

Look, if you look at Dubai's growth, obviously -- so first of all, if we're looking -- we have a plan which takes us to 2033, right? So it's a bit more than 5 years out. And that plan has been developed based on -- it was based on doubling the size of Dubai.

And if you look at the growth today, we're definitely way on track. We're 2 years into the plan. It was a 10-year plan. We're very much on track. We're ahead on many metrics. I think more people moved here than we expected in the 2 years, talent I'm talking about. Not sure because I always tell my team, it's not necessarily everything we're getting right. I think maybe some other geographies in those hundreds of cities that Stephen mentioned that maybe making some decisions which are not necessarily conducive to cultivating talent in their own cities. So they come here instead, which has been fine.

Without naming names.

Without naming names, not chat of house. But I think it's quite obvious. But the interesting thing is that what we've noticed in that time period is that one thing that's come out of COVID is the world has become smaller. People have become more mobile. Talent has become more mobile. And so Dubai is really, firstly, doubling down on all the areas it's like already very strong. Obviously, logistics, financial sector, technology, manufacturing, loads of these areas.

But then what we're also doing is we're also really spending a lot of time on the areas that are new. And of late, if you look at the last 2 years, we've done a lot in the deep tech space. And if you look now, we've become one of the fastest-growing places in AI. I think if you look on LinkedIn, it's obviously like in terms of talent moving here for that, blockchain, we have the largest [ first asset regulator ] in the world, more regulated entities than anywhere else in the world.

So even the new sectors that we've started to delve into, we've seen a very good response. It's a portfolio. So not everything is going to go perfectly. When it comes to the Exhibition business, this has been in Dubai for a long time. People don't realize a lot of these shows that we're talking about today are over 40 years old. And so the investment that's going into the infrastructure purely for the exhibition space, $3 billion to $4 billion minimum is going in the next 3 to 4 years, just in creating more space and the amenities around it, backed up by the hotel rooms, backed up by the airlines.

We see this more than doubling in the next 5 years, the actual core business of the exhibition space. And so with those type of growth rates, it gives a lot of opportunity. And just swinging back to this partnership, we do see -- because there's very, very clear alignment on opportunities and growth and also the ability to also bring in more IP from the wider group is very, very important to us. And so we do see a fantastic opportunity in that area.

So just to follow up on that. So Stephen, a lot of these franchises have been around for 20 years or long periods and they built over time. If you look at this doubling over the next few years for the business, is that mainly continuing to expand existing franchises? Or is this bringing in new franchises that you can really build from scratch? Can you give a sense of the balance in there?

I'm just conscious that there may be people sitting in the room or possibly on the live stream who are taking your words literally, doubling of the business in the next few years. Well, sorry, I can feel Richard getting itchy.

What was the comment you made?

Over the next 5 years, we're expecting the industry to double. Sorry. And the industry is quite wide, yes.

These are important nuances.

Important nuances. I'm here to ask the question...

I more than share Helal's ambition, but it's never good to get over your skis. The answer to your direct question is both or maybe all 3. I mean, definitely expansion from the brands that we've got and indeed the brands that the business inside Helal's Empire brings, definitely then syndicating or geolocating those brands into other markets in a way that's relevant to those markets with the advantage of you start with the customer base, you start with a database, you start with the premise, you start with the brand, but also bringing IP in sectors that are aligned with the industrial priorities of the location.

And that is another area where I think Dubai has been ahead of the game. We see it happening in other countries, countries that are trying to put themselves firmly on the global economic map. They're turning to us and saying, right, we've identified these 6 or 7 sectors.

Is there a brand or a trade show that you could use or we could jointly use. So I think all three of those are a way are part of the path to growth over the next 5, 10 years, underpinned by capacity. But capacity on its own isn't enough. I mean you need the capacity.

But I mean, another way of maybe cutting into your question, and I think Helal and I are completely aligned on this, and he's got deeper experience than me, is you have to ask yourself the question, what will the winning trade show of 5 or 10 years look like? And that will be a different thing, too. It will be much more thematic.

It will be much more commercially orientated. It will be much more experiential. It will be much more distinctive. It may conceivably last for a bit longer. It may have more layers. It may be more multilayered. It may be more multi-location. So the actual product itself is going to change as well as there being new product. I don't know what you.

No, I think you're right. I mean I think it's -- what I think is most interesting is if you look today, I was mentioning the new halls are delivering by the year-end. The first show to take place in them will be Gulfood.

Initially, those halls are 50% bigger. So we said to the Gulfood team, okay, you're going to move to the new halls, they're going to be 50% bigger. Obviously, ambitious team. Team came back 6 months later, said, you know what, we're happy with that. But we might just use the existing venue maybe for a conference or for something else, just said, okay, fine. I'm not doing anything with the existing venues still there for conference and everything else.

And a few months past. And today, the team presented to me, they've filled up this venue and they filled up that venue. So you can't really plan because that wasn't the plan. The plan was to fill up venue. They filled up two venues. So that's one example of a very -- show that's been around, I guess, 40-odd, 30, 40 years. It's food sector. It's a typical trade show, nothing different. But if you take a new area that Dubai is growing massively, and I'm just taking this as a small example, Dubai has invested very heavily and is becoming a global leader in wellness and longevity.

Today, we don't really have a show dedicated to that. We have shows around that, but not dedicated to it. If you ask the question in 5 years' time, will one of the leading shows be that.

Now again, I know we're on camera, and I know Stephen doesn't come in. But I would say, if I have a portfolio of 10, I'm going to give a caveat answer here to make sure I get it right. If I have a portfolio of 10 bets like that, like a VC would, I'm sure that one of them and maybe this one would come out and it would be a wow mega show.

And economically, both for a city, I mean, the interesting thing, which is maybe is not so relevant to the people in this room, but the correlation between the profitability of a show and the GDP impact on the city is very high because when you have a mega show and you have a must attend show and you have a leading show, it has a massive impact on the city because of investment, those companies actually investing, doing deals, people coming to it, and it also works fantastically on the bottom line of the owner of the show.

And so we really see -- I see these emerging new areas and getting a massive opportunity. And leveraging the group's expertise in a lot of the different areas, I think that's really big.

And it changes the nature of the brand of Dubai. If you have a reputation for a big show in longevity, it's a whole different game. Are there any other themes that you would pick out as being particularly exciting looking forward?

You mean category themes. Sector themes.

Yes.

Well, look, I certainly agree on wellness and longevity. In fact, we brought an existing brand in that market -- in that area to Dubai last year for a trial, and it did 4x what we predicted in our own plans. Still small, but that doesn't mean it couldn't do another 4x in the time period that Helal is talking about. So I definitely agree with that.

I mean, aviation is a big market. I mean, I've stolen it but to preconfigure, there's a fantastic quote from His Highness on one of the stands, which is we're not building the largest airport, we're building the aviation capital of the world. And I mean, the Dubai Air Show in the time that I've been coming to Dubai, which is 20-odd years now, the Dubai Air Show has gone from being one of the air shows. I think it would be fair to say then to being The Air Show. We don't take a huge amount of credit for that. Doug and his team before us, but I think we've taken that ball and developed it further.

But more broadly, the aviation sector is one where I think Dubai will become absolutely one of, if not the leading locations. So that's a big theme area. Food, definitely. I mean, Gulfood is a powerhouse show, but there are many other aspects to the food supply chain, packaging, design, ingredients, technology. So I think you can also -- you can -- it can already be an existing theme and then you can expand what you do with the theme. So new things, further expansion in things where there is already a leadership position and then new aspects of existing things. There's a lot to play for.

And just you mentioned globalization. I mean, to what extent are there really significant opportunities for these big franchises to go from sort of annual gatherings in a big form in one place to making people want to go another time during the year to another geography and to actually expand some of these franchises in that meaningful way? Or is it sort of -- are shows kind of tied to a place? Or are there things that are -- people want to go multiple times in different places?

You go first...

I don't think it's quite as simple as either/or. I think you will get these mega shows and they are around the world. They're not necessarily all in Dubai or whatever, you have -- and they build up over time.

And a certain extent of luck, I guess, and a certain extent of the team that's on them think more than the square meter, they think about all the other things that Stephen mentioned of the events of the future.

However, what's abundantly clear is that any other major hub in the world or any other growth market in the world that has that on the agenda, has that particular topic on the agenda. There is an opportunity to create a very meaningful event. Now the reason why I use the word event is because the design of the event will be different. The objectives of the event will be different. The ROI that people are looking for is different. And so if you're in an emerging market, that is looking to do a -- looking at a new sector. It will be all about attracting, for example, FDI.

It will be about capacity building. It will be about bringing that particular region to the show for those reasons. If it's a more mature market, it's often about how do you build the scale quickly. But we've seen whether it's Singapore or whether it's Kenya, whether it's Morocco or even Europe, there's definitely room to reinvent how people interact together with that -- with the topic because as long as they're getting a very good ROI, the show works really well.

Do you want to add anything to that? So just on the deal itself, just because I'm aware that a lot of people are going to maybe want a little bit more detail on this. You've got the venues business, which is obviously expanding capacity dramatically. How does the relationship work when it comes to that? Is there some sort of first dibs on the opportunities on this with the new venture? Or how do you think about that relationship?

So Dubai World Trade Center as a venue operator is completely separate to the events business even today. So the answer is no. The answer is arm's length relationship.

But again, with that much capacity expansion, I think the there's plenty of opportunity. And I think that -- I don't think that there would be a situation whereby, let's say, there's some unique IP that the team wanted to bring in the future from one of the other geographies.

It wouldn't -- they would obviously be more than welcome to, and that's part of the reason of doing the deal. Ultimately, what we look at is Dubai's calendar. What is good for Dubai's calendar is good for business. And as long as the counterparty is going to do well as well, then that's fine. It's got to be a win-win.

Stephen, can you talk about the cultures of the two companies? And obviously, you're bringing two big operators together with possibly slightly different perspectives. You're a very global company. It's very much focused on Dubai. Can you talk about how the cultures mesh and the sort of shared philosophy around how you do business?

Well, I can give you my view. I mean we haven't got to that point of the integration process yet. But I mean, let's start with what do we have in common. We're both running businesses in Dubai in the region. We're both doing some version of the same thing. We both have portfolios that are weighted to larger shows rather than small shows. I would say we are now both, although it's a bit later, I think, for your team.

We are now both taking brands actively into multiple markets. And we've both been here for a long time. So there's quite a lot of overlap. I mean if I compare it to other combinations we've done in other parts of the world, there's a lot more that's similar than worryingly different. But is there some difference? For sure.

But that's kind of okay. And to one of the points I made earlier, one of the things that we've definitely learned and I've certainly learned in the last 10, 12, 13 years is you have to have a similar set of values and then a lot of freedom to be different. And that's easy to say and hard to do.

And if you get that right, then I think you end up with a high degree of ownership in a market, in a location. You have serious executives and teams who feel like it's their brand, their business in a real sense because it is. And in many of our businesses because it actually is, still they have either a slice of equity or they have some sense of ownership.

But everybody agrees there's value in being part of the Informa franchise because it brings things that would be harder to do on a stand-alone basis in a single country or in a single brand. If you get that balance right, you can live with difference as long as it's not conflictual difference, right? That's how we think about it.

Yes. I think -- I mean, I would add a couple of things. So first of all, is this joint venture partnership, I look at it a little bit analytically. First of all, we don't have any crossover because this is a part of the biotracer to business being carved out.

So like there's no major finance functions and other things that need to merge. It's teams running shows. If you look at our team today, and you look at, for example, the team running the food portfolio and the team running the technology portfolio, they have very little in common, right? The food portfolio specialists on food, the traditional trade shows. The other guys will tell you more about AI than most AI analysts, right, because of what they do in their area. And obviously, we don't have a crossover in sectors between the two entities. We don't have two teams running technology shows that are going to be merged together.

So this is not a cost-cutting opportunity?

It's not a cost-cutting opportunity. It's not in the model, but hopefully, the team are watching it. But -- so the point is that when we talk to the team about it, the tech team is super excited that they're going to now sit next to a healthcare team because they know that health tech is a big area for them.

And so I see it very positively in that way. The other thing is like corporate culture and stuff, of course, there's always going to be and Stephen has a lot of experience with doing acquisitions and mergers. But I think just from a technical perspective, it's not your typical thing where you're saying, right, there's two exhibition companies coming together, 30% are going to have the same job. We don't have -- we have 0%. It's very different.

And the franchises are run quite separately.

In generally, in exhibition business, they are. And both of them have gone into these markets. And you see one team has done really well in Morocco, another team has done really well in Egypt.

And then you can all -- they all want to -- the nature of what Stephen is saying is they feel they own the business. They're very results orientated. It's a very entrepreneurial type of people. And so as long as that works for them, then it's...

So you're going to try and keep that culture of that entrepreneurialism within the franchises and keep them separate to do that thing?

There was nothing about -- I mean, just to be clear, there's not -- I don't think at any point in any meeting I've been in, we've had a discussion about where can we save money.

I mean this is solely focused on expansion, either expansion in Dubai, either expansion because of capacity expansion because of importing new IP or segmenting an existing sector or expansion internationally in markets where there is opportunity. I mean, might there be some scale efficiencies in procurement or relationships with contractors? For sure, over time, but it's not the driving reason.

I know we wanted to do some Q&A and allow folks in the audience. But before I say -- before I leave, do we have a name yet? Is it Informa International, OneCo? What are we referring to?

We don't have a name. It's a bit like having a child. I don't know if you ever find this issue, we did. A lot of names. A lot of names.

We had to name our kid before we left the hospital in America. So we were like -- there was no messing around.

Where did you go?

What do you mean which name? Well, it's a long story. We ended up with Tess. But it was around...

I can tell you it won't be called Tessco.

I think someone was taking that.

No, I was just saying like I want to excuse myself, I'm not looking at everyone because the light is extremely bright. Stephen has got these reflective glasses. So if you ask questions and I don't look at you, it's not me being rude.

Does anybody want -- we've got 7 or 8 minutes. Does anyone have a question they'd like to ask from the audience? Room for the hit here and then the lady behind.

Steve Liechti from Deutsche Bank. Can you just talk about timing of the transaction in terms of -- you went public on it some time ago and the target is towards the end of this year. What have you actually got to do to bring the two businesses together? Where is the execution risk in that on the timing? And just talk us through some of the actions there, please?

Do you want to go first? Do you want me to go first? Okay. We're still on the end of the year or the beginning of the next year time line. The -- for a whole host of reasons, I think our thinking is we'll either get it done before we get into Gulfoods first outing in the new venue and indeed the old venue.

And then relatively shortly after that, we take one of our big brands, which is our health care brand, WHX to the new venue or we'll do it on the other side. So either we'll get it done before or get it done shortly thereafter, so that it doesn't get in the way of the success of both of those.

And just to follow up, the -- when we saw the TechTarget transaction, I think the accounting sort of was a lot more complicated and fragmented than expected. I mean any views there in terms of technical issues in terms of the merger transaction?

Thanks for bringing that up, Steve. I mean we're only half an hour into the event. But it's nice that you made the trip. We don't think so is the answer. I mean I don't want to tempt fate having tempted it last time and it not being terribly kind to us. But there are a lot of differences.

Number one, the accounting conventions here are the same as they are in the United Kingdom. We're both working on IFRS accounting, whereas -- so we don't have the pleasure in Commerce of reverting into a SOC structure. We're also slightly, as I replied to Thorold, we're taking two businesses that do pretty much exactly the same thing in broadly the same ways.

So the way in which we revenue recognize account, the way in which we categorize direct costs, indirect costs, they're pretty similar. So I don't think the operational financial architecture of the combination is going to be anywhere near as testing as we found the Informa TechTarget experience. He said with at least two fingers crossed.

The lady at the back. Sorry, apologies, I didn't see you. If you go next. Sorry.

[indiscernible] from Bernstein. So it's quite clear how you see the exhibition space as a key part of Dubai, but why did you choose to partner with Informa rather than another global player or actually put your money into local exhibition players because there are quite a few that are around.

And my second one is also for you. I think you suggested that you were taking share in Dubai from other geographies. Where do you actually see that money coming from mostly?

So let me answer the first question. I think that's quite a simple answer because what I had mentioned earlier, if I take a step back from Dubai World Trade Center an entity, Dubai World Trade Center as an entity is owned by Investment Corporation of Dubai, similar to Emirates Airline and others, which is the sovereign wealth fund of Dubai.

Obviously, we look to first lens was very financial to make sure that we could grow faster and we could do better than we could do by ourselves or with other targets that we had, and we did have other options, and it turned out to be the best. The other thing is, obviously, spending time with Stephen and obviously, the team, we realized that there's a sort of direct fit in terms of not just the team's culture, but the ambitions, the geographies we're in, and there's no crossover.

So it just looked like it would be a lot easier, to be frank. I mean, I think Stephen, I don't know his past through, but he gave a very sort of answer. I mean, for me, it is very straightforward compared to a lot of the other stuff we're doing. So I felt very confident in that.

So I think that's basically -- it's not that exciting reason, but it's the simple reason. When it comes to taking market share, especially in the exhibition business, it's on a portfolio-by-portfolio because if you just look at the top 5 shows in the world and you look at the growth rate of the show here, like if we're in the top 3 and you look at the growth rate in the shows here, you can say, are we growing faster or not?

Are we taking a larger part of the global geography or not? So you take Gulfood, we are growing faster than Anuga or [ Sialo ] . And so we're taking -- but each one will be different. It wouldn't be just from one country. It would be show related. So I hope that answers your question. It's very show related.

Do you want to ask a question here? Yes, at the front.

It's Nick Dempsey from Barclays. I've got two, please. So just on the increased exhibition space that's coming on stream in Dubai, are there particular current Informa shows that will definitely benefit from that in 2026? Or will it initially be the Dubai World Trade Center shows and then eventually Informa shows?

And then second one, when you did the Saudi transaction, you were focused on a minimum margin for newly launched shows to prevent the kind of dilution too much on your margin. Is there something being considered here for new shows?

I mean the next show, I think I'm correct in saying that the next show after Gulfood and the new venue is ours, isn't it? -- is WHX. So that will be the next one off the next taxi off the rank, so to speak, Nick. Did we say that there was a minimum margin on new shows in Saudi? I don't think we -- did we say that? Richard, did you say that?

Overall, there was...

Yes, yes, that's better. That's what I thought. It's just the construction of your question. I didn't recognize, sorry, Nick.

I mean, Saudi was a totally different market for us. I mean it's a totally different market in lots of ways. But we were establishing a business from scratch effectively. In fact, we could argue, and I think I wouldn't be misrepresenting, I can't see in the light where Annabelle is, we were establishing an industry in part from scratch. I mean there were some incidental trade shows, but nothing.

At that point, Saudi was nowhere near as far down the line as Dubai is in being a global center. It's making significant strides, and we're making some of those strides with them. So I think the context of that comment was to get into that market, we accepted that there would be a dilution to the margin. We had some view about what the kind of a minimum margin would work for us, which would be different from elsewhere in the world, and then we play catch-up. But it didn't specifically relate to new shows. It was really our approach to the business model. Does that answer your question, Nick?

We are out of time. Should we do more questions or we should call it a day. Great. Thank you both very much indeed.

Thanks a lot for having me.

Thanks very much -- thanks for doing that. I keep that on sorry. What happens? Right. Anyone need to come for break? No, good. Right. We'll keep going. Do I go back or forward?

Forward? No, I don't think it is actually. It is fantastic.

Right. Okay. Well, this is an opportunity for me just to repeat a welcome. I know a good number of you have traveled. A bit of a show of hands up for how many people this is their first time in Dubai. That's a good few. Good few.

Well, listen, I hope you get a lot out of it. It's a fantastic place. I was at the air show earlier this morning, which is why I was not here for the sort of milling around beforehand because we opened the air show this morning, you'll get to see it tomorrow for those who are going.

Doug can keep me honest because he knows more about the air show than I do. But I would say it really has stepped up. It's a fantastic show. One of the privileges of my job is you get to see a lot of shows around the world in many places, and it really has all the features you would want in a trade show. And I took this photograph on my little iPhone on one of the stands from His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid, which says, we're not building -- it's the stand if you go to tomorrow, which has got the 2-dimensional model of the new airport.

And there were these three people in front of me as I was trying to take this picture, I want to take a picture of the actual model. And I didn't want to say get out of the way because we weren't taking a picture, but my body language was communicating, could you get it?

So they turn around to say, and I said, if you wouldn't mind I'm trying to take a picture. And as soon as they heard my accent, they said, I reckon this will be here before we've even got another runway. And then -- so we had a bit of a chat about the difference between airport development in, if you might call the legacy world and airport development in a place that's got more forward-looking opportunities.

I just thought this was a fantastic example of a very, very simple vision statement. We're not building the largest airport in the world. We're building the aviation capital of the world. I mean it's such a simple statement of intent, of forward intent.

And as I said in the session with Helal, I've been coming to and from this country and city for over 20 years now. And over that period, the thing that has been consistent is the focus on what's coming next, not what's come before, what's coming next. And I think you got a very clear sense of that in Helal's answer to how it relates to the exhibition business and the trade show business.

And that, more than anything, is what led me to knock on his door and say, listen, as well as being a big customer, why don't we become partners? We could do something much better together than we can do individually. Anyway, just to go back to go forward because my job here is to do a bit of a scene set is just to talk about where we are as a company, where we're going and then to hand it over to the other presenters.

This has been a theme for us for a very, very long time, growth. And the reason why is because back in the day, whilst there was nothing spectacularly wrong with Informa, we were hovering back in 2012, 2013 at or around that place for those of you who are familiar with British companies is a place that can be quite testing.

We were turning over around GBP 1 billion a year. We were making around GBP 200-or-so millions of profit. We were paying 50% of our profit in dividends. We had some debt interest, a bit more debt interest than we wanted. We had just about enough money to buy a couple of bolt-ons that would just about keep us flat or marginally growing year-on-year. Cycle 1, cycle 2, cycle 3, cycle 4.

Our equity had no real value, and therefore, it was very, very hard to use our equity currency to grow the company. And by definition, at that size, your cash flows are relatively de minimis. So the question for us was, was there a way in which we could become a scale player? And if we could become a scale player, where should we choose to play?

That's kind of the question that I was posed or I was posing when I took over as Chief Executive back in the middle of 2013. The company at that time was a mixture of different assets. And actually, our trade show business was our smallest business if it had been a stand-alone business, which it was not. It was integrated into many other things. Our biggest business by some margin was the Taylor & Francis business, which Penny and the team will talk about later.

Our next biggest business was our conference business. But whilst many of you, I'm sure, in the questions will want again to get into the -- is AI going to disintermediate your business discussion. Back then, what was definitely clear was that the Internet was definitely going to disintermediate the spot conference business. Because if you're doing 12,000 to 15,000 spot conferences a year where you're getting 50 people in the room and charging them GBP 100 to hear the latest insight on a subject, that wasn't going to survive the full onslaught of full-scale connectivity.

So the conference business clearly could not be our future. And whilst we were in the data business largely through the acquisition of Data Monitor, which had been less than our finest hour as a company and a couple of other things, we were a small player. And it was very, very clear. If you wanted to be in a subscription data business, you needed a bigger balance sheet than we were ever going to have. So the conclusion we came to was really the answer lay in the trade show business.

That's where we were going to get growth. So we had to kind of shift the company from here to where we are on the other side of this chart. And for a while, it went sort of reasonably well. And then, of course, we had this existential moment when we were wondering whether or not that was such a smart idea when Richard, Gareth and I were wondering around trying to persuade people to lend us money because we believed that face-to-face events were going to come back where 90% of the people we met said, it's never going to happen. Everyone's going virtual. I'm going to put my money into hopping and face-to-face events and global travel are going to disappear.

Actually, what happened was we discovered that if you have enforced global prohibition on your core product, what you discover on the other side of it is that your customers have to make an active decision of whether they want it because they've been denied it. And what we discovered was that our customers really did want it. And so we made probably the key pivot decision at this end of this time line, which was to sell at that point our intelligence businesses.

Much better to sell it here because we raised GBP 2.5 billion. Whereas back here when everyone told me to sell it, we did a valuation and we'd have got just over GBP 300 million for our intelligence businesses. So it gave us a lot more money. Now we spent a bit of money, about GBP 35 million to turn those into meaningful businesses, but you take that trade every day.

That then allowed us to give GBP 1 billion back to shareholders, which we borrowed during COVID to survive, and it allowed us to then recycle that capital before the world had fully adjusted to the reality that face-to-face was going to be a powerhouse business to be in. And that allowed us to acquire the Tarsus business, Doug's business, the HIMSS business, Winsight and the Ascential business.

And since then, we've really been very focused on doubling down on the performance of that business and simultaneously looking at what we need to do similarly in the academic business. This is what it's done for the company in terms of growth, cash flow growth and revenue growth. And this is what it's also done in terms of geography. This is the group by revenue.

Now the B2B markets business is nearly 83% of the business. And this business this year is going to grow at around 9%. This is it by geography. North America is still the biggest. But if you look at it by -- in the B2B business, EMEA, and this is pre the OneCo combination. Let's call it, Tess. The EMEA business is getting bigger and the growth rates in that part of the world are considerably greater.

So a significant change in revenue mix, a significant change in geographic mix. And this, more than anything, I think, is the big change. The U.K., where we're listed, where we're domiciled and where we still employ a lot of people, I think just over 3,000 people, it isn't the place where the company makes its money. And it's increasingly not where the place where the company looks out of the world to say, where is the future of the company going to be.

To go back to the what's our plan for the next 5 to 10 years, we're unlikely to find the answer looking out from London. This then in the deck, for those who are interested, gives you a bit more breakdown on our live events revenue by headcount and then by sector. And then this is how we operate the business.

As everyone knows, we've got the three businesses, the two B2B digital businesses and the academic business. We're not going to talk much about TechTarget today. TechTarget has not done in year 1 what we wanted it to do, and our plan is for it to begin to do that in year 2.

Today, that's pretty much all I'm going to say about TechTarget, as Steve hopefully teed up earlier, Thanks, Steve. This turned out to be slightly trickier than we thought on combination, and we faced a little bit of a market headwind in year 1. The internal plumbing issues, we've by and large, resolved. So now we're just focused on how do we take share in that market. So our plan is to get that business back into growth.

Relatively, it's a small contributor to earnings, but hopefully, by '26 and '27, it will start being a bigger contributor to earnings. This business, I'm going to come on and talk about a bit more, but just to talk about the academic business, Back here, I would say, and Alex Robinson, who was around at the time, who will be speaking later, can keep me honest.

I would say Taylor & Francis back in 2013 or when I joined the Board in 2010, it was a straight down the fairway traditional academic publisher for those of you who followed the company for a long time. The [indiscernible] it was essentially two businesses, a journals business, 100% pay to read and in the journals business, there was no open business in there at all. Geographically, we had no presence at all in Asia outside of what you might call historically adjacent U.K. markets like Singapore and Australia and to a degree, New Zealand.

The books business was 90%, 95% of physical books business. e-books existed as a product, the manufacturing process was electronic, but the business was a physical book. We had warehouses. We did delivery. We had year-end stocking orders and the rush to get it out the physical warehouse at the end of the year. It was a very, very different business to what it is today.

Over the period, this business has changed. Open, we've embraced, I think, it took us a bit of time, but we got there in the end. It's now 20% plus of the business, both Open Access and Open Research. The reference business is now majority nonphysical and only going in one direction. We've changed the way that business goes to market. It's much less of an intermediated business, much more of a direct-to-customer business.

But the big question, which is what Penny has joined us to try and lead is how do we take that change and make it more of a knowledge platform business and get it into what we inside in Informa call a 5% club, which is the base level of performance we've set for businesses inside the group. Penny, Alex and Ashok will come back and talk about that later. But that's really the context in which we think about the academic business.

On AI, we've embraced AI. We took a pretty early decision that AI was coming. It was coming at a click. So why don't we spend a bit of money and try and embrace it. We've built modularly our own support agent inside our own company called Elysia. We trailed it a bit with the annual report. So some of you may have played around with it, if you spent some time looking at our annual report.

We did that because it allows us to put all of our own data inside Elysia, which obviously we wouldn't choose to put on ChatGPT or another LLM. And it's allowing us to slowly but surely in a drumbeat of delivery, this is a program that Alex is running, to improve capability inside the business. The capability is designed to free up time to focus on quality, product distinction and speed to market and geographic expansion.

We're not looking to take cost out particularly. We're looking to reallocate time to more productive activity, and we are finding that to be a significant advantage in both of our businesses.

Where does that lead us financially? This is our basic thesis on a going-forward basis for the company. If you go back to that time line, we're 4, 5 years outside of COVID. So where are we? This is kind of where we see the company coming to the end of 2025. We see no reason why we can't, over the period, '26, '27, '28, be a 5%-plus baseline growth business compounding over that period.

With the B2B business being a 6%-plus compound grower as a minimum; the academic business, 3% to 4% is a minimum with an ambition to get to 5%, so therefore, it's net neutral on the group ambition; and similarly with Informa TechTarget. You flow that through what that then means that our profits would then grow a bit of a pace ahead of our revenues. So that would flow through to our earnings.

We're seeing our margin tick up. This year will be just over 28%. If you remember in the depths of COVID, we dropped down to 20%, and our intention is to get our margins back up to 30%. And we've set ourselves a target of converting 90%-plus of our cash -- operating cash flow into operating profit.

If you look at that over the bottom, for those of you at the back of the room who couldn't see it, if you take 3 years of compounding growth at those levels, that's about GBP 630 million of additional revenue. And if that GBP 630 million of additional revenue drops through at, say, 40%, you might say, why not 50%? I might argue that it could be 30%, but say at 40%, then you're creating real organic value out of the engine that we have bought, built and developed over the period. And that's where we are positioning ourselves for compounding financial returns over the period.

Why should you believe that's possible? Well, let's, as Helal said, step out of the B2B events business. And let's think about what sector is the B2B events business in? And we would say the events business is in this sector. It's in the market for live activity. What are people willing to pay in order to get access to a live event rather than a digitized virtual or alternative solution.

You see in sports, you see in music, you see in theater, you see in a range of areas. The increasing premium value that's attached to a live product as long as that live product has some level of unique distinction and quality that isn't replicable in an easier manner.

What about the actual market for B2B live events? Well, fundamentally, it's structurally a growth market for a whole variety of reasons. In round numbers, the total addressable market is not a super big market, but it's big enough, it's GBP 30 billion. It's absolutely, as we discussed in that Q&A, a global industry, but it's 100% a global industry with national delivery. You have to be able to take your brands and then deliver them in a relevant way in the market in which you work.

It's very fragmented. It's still the case today that half the market is owned by trade associations, particularly in China and North America. About 10% of the market is businesses like Helal's events business, so it's events that are owned by venue operators. So that means that only 40% of that market is actually owned by people like us, and you can do the math on what that means our market share is. But the good thing is that means our market share is actually relatively small. So we have significant runway ahead in the coming years.

And then you've got some structural growth drivers, and I'll pick out 2 of these. The first, we absolutely, I think, got a case study there from Helal, is countries that are using meetings, incentives, conferences and exhibitions as an economic strategy for developing market access and economic development in country [ a, b or c ].

And this, to be honest, if I went back to my time line back in 2013, '14, '15, nobody was opening their door for me to have a cup of coffee with them to have a chat about this. I mean most people didn't even know who I was or who we were. In the last 4 or 5 years since COVID, there's almost nowhere now we can't go and have that discussion: a, because we're the biggest player in the market; and b, because many other countries have come to the market and recognize that it is a significant driver of an economic multiplier, which is considerably more valuable than the return to the event operator. So if they can find a counterparty that is an event operator that can operate at global scale, that's a very easy conversation to conduct on a bilateral basis.

And the second is a belief statement that there is a rising value in face-to-face. There may well be less of it, but if you own the primary brand in it, it's very, very valuable. And those 2 things together are really part of what's driving a lot of our growth. I'll skip this. It's in the chart.

This is where we are today. So back in 2015, GBP 500 million; back in 2013, just sub GBP 100 million. This year, we'll be just north of GBP 3 billion. This is where we are ranked to the next biggest player, the next biggest player. When I first started looking at this, Helal was running a bigger business than I was running when I first met him for a cup of coffee by some margin. We've been an acquirer, make no bones about that. I didn't turn up in 2014, '15, '16 and tell the market, I'm going to acquire lots of companies because if you do that on day 1, most of them they run for the hills.

We did say we were going to build or buy a leadership position in the events market. We did say that for the first 2 years. And then we bought Hanley Wood. And then everyone said to us, why are you doing that? We said, we have spent the last 2 years saying we're going to build or buy a leadership position in the events market.

Anyway, from Hanley Wood, we then went on, we then went on, we then went on. I think the next period, we don't need to be an acquisition vehicle, but we definitely can continue to be a consolidating vehicle. We just need to be much more forensic about where we choose to consolidate, because now we don't need to buy, we might just choose to in certain sectors or in certain geographies. But that's essentially the scale of the business. That then is how it breaks down by events, by headcount and by revenue.

And this -- I mean, this is a sort of slightly rainbow colored chart. But I often say to people, a bit like the brands and the businesses that we have bought, the most interesting thing about this for me, at least, isn't the sectors we're in. It's the sectors we're not in. Because one of the advantages of building a business largely from scratch is you can choose what, where you're going to play. You can also choose where you're not going to play.

So by and large, we've tried to stay out of -- not entirely, but we've tried to stay out of retail-facing markets. We've tried to stay out of low-margin end markets. We've tried to stay out of markets that have high and complex government intervention and regulation because they tend to be a bit more volatile. We've stayed out of energy, we stayed out of extraction industries. So we've made some conscious choices about where we will build our business because we think that lowers the volatility in the performance of that business.

Now these are our biggest franchises. This rather speaks to the question that somebody asked in the Q&A to Helal and myself, which is, you can take a brand. There's a mothership inside that GBP 220 million, but there are 9 other versions of CPHI that happen elsewhere or one that might be more familiar to you, SuperReturn.

There's a mothership in SuperReturn in Berlin, which I think we've put in the goody bag, a VIP freebie ticket for those of you who want to come to SuperReturn in Berlin in 2026, which is a fabulous event. But there are 23 other SuperReturns. So we really have begun the process of industrially syndicating the brands where we think there is value in doing it and using our geographic position to drive growth and, as you can see, drive revenue.

If you do what I do for living, this is just a thing of beauty. These are our top 50 brands. We don't disclose individual brands by revenue, but there's GBP 1.5 billion of revenue here. They range from $50 million, sorry for the switch, but most of these brands report in dollars. They range from $15 million up to $140 million. We have 2 brands on their own that make more revenue as a single brand than our entire trade show business did 11 years ago.

If you could -- if we stood this business up, I don't know what this says about either our IRR capability or how markets price things. But if you stood these 50 brands up as a stand-alone business and priced it to our valuation today, you get the other half of our B2B business for free, you get Taylor & Francis for free and you get Informa TechTarget for free. Because these 50 brands basically match our market value as of last night when the markets closed.

There is not a brand portfolio like this anywhere in the world. And this is what is allowing us to go around the world and have conversations in different geographies about what would you like to do to expand your market? Which sectors are you most interested in? Where do you see economic growth? What's your opportunity for further expansion? How much more are you making available for capacity in the years to come? And how can we work with you as a partner?

We run our business this way now. Patrick will speak later on the stage, runs Informa Markets, our transaction-led business. Andy runs Informa Connect, which is our more content-led business. And Matthieu runs our newest business, if you like, Informa Festivals, our experience-led business. These are -- this is what I would call the poison of PowerPoint rather than the clarity of PowerPoint because it's not as neat as this.

There are overlaps. We've got experience-led brands in here, and we've got transaction-led brands in there and vice versa. But in the main, there is reason behind our organization and our approach to it. But what I would say is that today, in round numbers, GBP 2 billion of our revenue is here and about another GBP 1.5 billion is here. And the market is going this way. So to Helal's point about what is our product going to be in 5 to 7 years? It's going to be more distinctive, more experiential, more content-led, more unique, more contributing, more of a market participant than merely just a physical place where buyers can meet sellers. There will still be some shows, which are buyers and sellers for sure. In my professional lifetime, I'm sure that's true. But the trend line is only going in that direction.

What does that, therefore, mean in what we can do with growth because the more the trend line goes in that direction, the easier it is for us to do this, the easier it is for us to price for value rather than for space. The easier it is for us to ensure that in each sector of participant in a sector or in a show, you maximize your market penetration rather than just fill up the hall. The easier it is for us to take our brands and move them into multiple geographies. The easier it is for us to fill up the capacity that is coming into the market in multiple places.

The easier it is for us to take attendee value. Today, we have $500 million of attendee revenue in our model, $500 million. The vast majority of that is in Andy's business and then in Matthieu's business. The smallest amount actually is in Informa Markets because traditionally in trade shows, you didn't charge attendees, you charged exhibitors.

But actually, if you're building a product that has real multidimensional value, why would you not use attendee pricing as a means of filtering your bias? Why would you not use attendee pricing as a means of demonstrating value? Why would you not use attendee pricing as a way of driving your revenue? And then finally, the richer the event, the more distinctive the event, the more multilayered the event, the easier it is to sell other products and services.

And as Richard said at the opening, we've showcased a couple of those in the product demos, Lead Insights as an example, where you can offer other products and services. Even in this business here, we're in this business. People will pay $10 a lead, $50 a lead, $150 a lead, sometimes $300 a lead for a fully qualified warm sales lead. So that's a market with a lot of pricing spread in it.

So if you can be in a position to provide the premium product to a premium attendee, in a premium location, in a market which has put a premium on that category, where you really have got the premium players in that market, your ability to price for value is really very attractive. And those are the building blocks for our growth strategy over the next 3 to 4 years.

The next 3 slides just take you through the components of how do you price for value. What are the inputs, inflation, market growth, event position, maturity and what that then allows us to do in the way in which we component price. And I'd encourage you when Penny is on the stage with Patrick and Matthieu and Andy to throw questions at this because this has become a really interesting part of our business.

Back 10, 12 years ago, we negotiated with a venue owner. We got the hall. We paid a gross price. We worked out how much of the net space we could use and we sold the space. That was the model. Nothing wrong with that model, but it's definitely changing. This is what we mean by market penetration. And this is really continuously looking at new customer segments as you develop in a market and you see new market opportunities coming along. And we've got quite a good few of them in our -- in the markets in which we operate.

Energy in the last few years, no new news. Batteries has become a big part of the business. But 5 years ago, it wasn't. So okay, is there an opportunity for a Battery Show? AI. Well, what's the big -- what backs up AI? Well, data centers. Well, 4, 5 years ago, we didn't have a big data center. We didn't have a big data show. Now we've got the biggest data center show in the U.S. In aviation, well, everyone knows about getting on a plane and going to Dubai, but what about space? Well, actually, space is the new frontier in aviation transport. So we are developing a whole portfolio of space tech experts, and so you go on.

So the other thing about markets is they change. They change and they metamorphize over time. And this allows you to follow your market and then be able to bring new products to market and get the network effects that come from being the scale player.

I would say this is one of the things I would give as a B+, possibly even an A- given I'm in public as colleagues who are in the room will know, I'd probably give us a C- in an internal meeting because it's always better to be dissatisfied internally. But we've got really good at doing this. Taking our brands, identifying the right geographical market, getting there early, putting people in that market, giving them resource and then building a market position. And if you do that really well, you're building long-term annuity values, which if you do it well and you build a product that's sustainable, it then makes it very, very difficult for other people to come in and challenge your market position.

And you see that in the way in which this part of the market has shrunk and the rest of the market has grown for us. And it's been a big part of the engine of our growth in the last 5 or 6 years.

We touched on this on the stage. I mean, I don't have much more to add. I think the rationale for this combination makes eminent sense. We have a long-standing partnership. We know each other well. There is no revenue leakage. There is no overlap. There is no revenue competition. There's a lot of geographic opportunity in both portfolios, and that's before you get to the inbound opportunity in Dubai as more capacity comes on. And it will give us alongside our business in Saudi, it will give us a market leadership position in this part of the world, which really is the engine for growth.

As part of that, we are including our business in Turkey and our business in India. I'm not going to steal Yogesh and Atilla's thunder because both of them have been building our businesses here. Both of these are scale and growth markets. We definitely are the leading player in both markets. There's capacity coming into both markets, and there's a real opportunity for us to do more.

In KSA, similarly, we've pretty much gone from a standing start. We weren't really in Saudi Arabia, bar a fly-in, fly out, a couple of small shows, the other side of COVID, since then, we've built a business. We've now got over 300 colleagues there. There are 2 major venues in Riyadh. We've got 20 brands in the portfolio for next year at 1 million attendees and the economic impact is remarkable.

Today, as well as opening the Dubai Airshow, we opened Cityscape Global in Riyadh. That will be the largest commercial real estate show in the world this week. And previously, that was a brand that we used to run in other markets. The team there are doing an absolutely outstanding job, and there's further runway ahead there as well.

On capacity and supply, this is one of the other features of the market. Sometimes you can worry about new capacity coming to a market. Does it lower the price? Is there the demand? We believe there is. And then you get into a kind of running competition. Now we can have a bit of a debate about -- I mean, I would say, for example, why is my hometown not on here? Why does [ Paris? ] Why does never appear on this map. But what are the key features of a global gateway city? Well, you've got to have a world-class B2B events venue for us to look at it. And that isn't just absolute size.

That's the nature of the venue, how modular is it, how accessible is it? Can you get in, can you get out? What's the technology capability inside the venue. It's not just the space equation, well obviously, space matters. As Helal touched on, airport capacity and connections. One of the things I found in the last year, basing myself out of here, the 6-, 7-hour question, you can get anywhere in the world from here. It's fantastically well connected. And as well as the capacity, you've also got to have world-class airlines so that you're not spending 20% of your time hanging out in a departure lounge.

You need scale and range of hotel capacity. This is a conversation I and my other colleagues in the events business often have now with mayors and governors of established legacy cities or more established cities, which is it's great to have 2 5-star hotels or 1 5-star hotel. But if you want to run an event with 200,000 attendees, you need very, very good 3-star, 4-star, 5-star hotels. So you've got to have range in capacity, not just luxury capacity.

The city needs to work. That's transport infrastructure, distribution, parking, public transport and traffic management. And it really helps. It really helps if the city is run as a brand. Because the people who go, all of us, and I'm sure many people here in the room, when you turn to your husband or your wife or your partner or your dog or your children and say, well, what are you doing this week?

And you say, I'm going to Dubai. And I suspect with a number of people that evoked a reaction, probably not -- that's pretty tough. And that's partly because it has a bit of a brand. It has a bit of an image, has a bit of a positioning. And the same is true with some of the second-tier cities you see coming up in North America that are really biting at the ankles of some of the traditional mainstream cities in North America. Same is true in China. Same is true in India. Same is true in South America.

So city management and being competitive as a city brand is also quite relevant because industries and certainly particular industries like to be in a place where it's slightly happening in a way that's relevant to their industry. And so for us, the fact that the city market has become more competitive is actually a driver of growth for us because it means there is competitive supply. It's a big change.

The Dubai venue expansion has been laid out. That's really significant. That will put Dubai, if you take once they get to the other side of the full expression of [ DEC ], I think I'm correct. I'm looking at Trixie and John. I think that will put Dubai sixth on the world city list in absolute capacity. That's pretty amazing, just in terms of absolute physical capacity.

We're also using our scale to change the nature of our relationships with venues and cities to try and have more longer-term contracts where there's mutuality on both sides, predictability, support, pricing and also co-marketing and in some cases, other incentives. So there's a lot going on in the back end of our business where we're taking advantage of our scale and our market position.

Attendee value I've talked about. This is how it racks at the moment. In Markets, it's about $110 million, tell me if I'm wrong here, Patrick, or in Connect, about $250 million, Festivals, about $130 million. The interesting question is what could that number be in 3 to 4 years? And what should it be once you layer on growth and once you layer on the type of growth that you're putting into the business? And what does it allow you to do in improving the quality of the audience for the customer? I'm not going to dwell on amplification because we're going to cover that later.

And when you wrap that all up, that gets us to where our confidence in this 3-year '26, '27, '28 going into '29 plan. We feel confident in the market. We feel confident in our position in the market. So in simple terms, we think we're a good house in a good neighborhood. We think the growth drivers in that market are not unique to us, but we're maybe uniquely positioned to take advantage of them.

We're getting much better at some of the levers of growth rather than just the execution performance of delivery, and that gives us further confidence. We have a high degree of confidence that over the period of the plan, the academic business can continue the path of change to get to a point whereby it's matching the base level growth rates in the group.

And as I said, TechTarget, we will do what we set out to do, but we might just be a year or 18 months behind schedule for which apologies. Financially, that takes us to this picture, which on a 3- to 4-year basis, we think is a very attractive compounding financial framework and gives us a set of things that will require us to operate discipline in -- throughout that 3- to 4-year period.

Am I allowed to take questions or do we go straight to -- go straight. Two questions afterwards quite right. I'm glad Richard is here. Penny, Patrick, Andy and Matthieu, if I could invite you to bring a chair and come to the stage. Thanks for listening.

So we've all heard today's theme is around compounding growth. And as we heard from Stephen, there are many different drivers of this growth. I'd love to hear from each of you what you're most excited about? Patrick, do you want to start?

Well, thank you. Well, on the theme of the day, I'm very excited about doing some more compounding as we go forward. I'm pleased with the performance in 2025, and that gives us momentum into 2026, which is very exciting. I think the opportunity has already been spoken about, to some extent, the opportunities for us to continue to compound through the volume growth and yield growth through our brands, through geographic expansion and through category expansion is something that's particularly exciting for Informa Markets.

And also from a product perspective, the investments that we've made in IIRIS, our first-party data and the ability to build new products and services around data and using the investments coming through One Informa, I think that's going to be a really exciting future for us as well.

Amazing. Matthieu, would you like to go next?

Thanks, Penny. You've seen the framework, the growth framework. For me, the opportunity is to execute that growth framework in its entirety at pace and at scale. When you look at each of those growth levers across our brands, our categories, our markets, there's a significant material sort of price again each of them over the next 3 years.

For me, specifically across Festivals, the 3 key ones, which we are actively working on doubling down on our #1 penetration, rigorously understanding our markets, our audiences, understanding our penetration or market share, if you want, and driving that further.

For example, Money20/20, which I think a lot of you are familiar with, that's taking our penetration of U.S. banks from 20% to 30% over the next 3 years. In gaming, that's furthering our penetration of the gaming ecosystem by relaunching GDC as a Festival of Gaming in March 2026.

Number two, geo, which we've touched on a little bit. We've already had a great example this year with the launch of Money20/20 in KSA, which was very successful. I've got the chance to work with a great portfolio of big brands with global relevance. So there's quite a bit we can do on geo expansion still, and we might come back to that.

And thirdly, amplification. Our customers' needs in Festivals are constantly evolving. And so we have that opportunity to innovate and offer new products and services that continually differentiate the events. So for example, that's offering new inventory asset space, which is not in the venue, enabling our customers to create bespoke activation or experiences for their own clients, but it could be new meeting products, new lead gen products, new award products, new media products, et cetera. So the entirety of the framework is what I'm excited about for us in festivals is doubling down on penetration, geo and amplification.

Last, but not least, we're having a good year as well, Patrick, which is nice.

Collaboration, not...

Sorry, sorry, yes, of course. If you look at the amplification side, Connect, which is delegates and it has sponsors exhibitors, there's a lot of work around content in that space. And trying to create a better customer experience, wanting to become more festivalized over time, we've done really well. If you use NPS as a score, I think probably 80% to 90% of our events have increased their NPS score over the period of time, which gives us a lot of confidence.

But if you think about -- I'm really excited on how we can evolve our content area through AI. Over the last couple of years, we've captured 29,000 videos at events on our streaming platform. But AI now will allow us to take content from every single event and turn it instantaneously into new content, whether it's podcast, whether it's event summaries, whether it's day summaries, which is added value for the attendee. We could probably charge them more for that individually or we can charge them more for the pricing or it's sponsored products. Super excited. We're testing all this at AI Summit coming up in New York. And that's a very, very exciting area for us.

The other bit I can't not say about the -- because Helal talked about wellness and Stephen talked about data centers. We have an amazing data center portfolio where I think the opportunity for that is massive. Our AI portfolio is doing very well, and that still continues to be strong.

Wellness, we've got 2 very strong brands in A4M and AMWC, and it was the AMWC launch just a month-or-so in Dubai, which was a massive success. So the whole wellness area, we think, is very, very exciting. And SuperReturn, our private capital brand, just carries on from strength to strength. So we expect to have an even better couple of years for SuperReturn as well.

It's really interesting because as you've all touched on similar thematics, you've actually given quite different answers. So you all run a B2B events divisions, which have lots of similarities, but also distinctions. It'd be lovely to hear from you sort of what are some of those distinctions. Patrick, do you want to start again?

Well, look, I mean, as Stephen has already highlighted and illustrated in some of the slides, we have fantastic brands, and we have a global reach and we have local delivery. I mean it's a fantastic place to start. And I think that's common across us. For Informa Markets in particular, creating events where buyers and sellers can meet to learn, to discover, but very importantly, to transact, and that's a particular focus of Informa Markets.

And also, I'd say we have an enormous benefit in that next year's event is booked at this year's event. So we have great visibility of future revenues for this business, in particular.

Andy?

Yes. I think all of our events aspire to be Festivals, but we start on content. We focus on incredibly unique high-value content to attract amazing high-quality audiences. We spend a lot of time trying to make sure that's engaged and interacted through networking. But the thing that we have different, we have a lot of events.

So SuperReturn, whether it's 24 or 27 events, we have the ability to try something out in January and polish it and improve it and try it again in May and try it in June and try it in September. And we did that with Lead Insights. It started in our Life Sciences area and one small portfolio. Very soon, it was across the whole of Life Sciences, and then it's spread across the rest of Connect, and now it's going across the rest of Informa.

So we have that ability to learn within the year. Problem with some one event products is you've got to wait until next year before you have another crack. So I think our ability to test and try, and I think it's been really, really helpful for Informa because we fed a lot of some of the new initiatives in, which have come and we've tested and we've learned in Connect. So that's a bit different to Patrick's, I think.

Just building on what Patrick and Andy have said, there are no hard boundaries between the divisions, in fact, less and less, and that's a good thing. We'll come back to One Informa, I'm sure. But what makes Festivals possibly a bit different is how we think of the overall product being experience-led, and that's very much in response to our customers' needs.

As I shared in June at the investor field trip during Cannes, if you were there, our definition of an Informa Festivals is to craft unmissable experiences, whether physical or digital, by the way, that inspire and celebrate industries and enable our customers to meet, discover, play and grow. So hopefully, if you were in Cannes in June or if you were at Money20/20 in Las Vegas just last month, you would have seen great examples of that meet, discover, play, grow secret sauce. So again, it's not very different, but we're very focused on that 360 experience, the meeting, the discover, which is the content; the play, which is the experience; and the grow, which is the recognition.

Now since you've raised hand, Matthieu, why don't we stay on the topic of Ascential because many of the audience will have been familiar with Ascential before the acquisition. What has Informa brought to some of the brands within that portfolio?

Thanks, Penny. For the ex-Ascential brands and teams, without a doubt, the biggest benefit from Informa is the access to the global platform. Phil Thomas, the ex-CEO of Ascential, who many of you know, would absolutely be the first to recognize this. For him and for Ascential plc stand-alone, unlocking the Middle East, unlocking Asia, unlocking Lat Am was very, very hard indeed. So that's for sure the biggest unlock.

And Patrick and Andy, it'd be lovely to hear from you in terms of what is it bringing to the portfolio in terms of having Money20/20 and Cannes Lion within the portfolio for Informa more widely.

First for you there.

Well, look, I think as Matthieu, at least to the focus on brand and brand building and real exceptional experience. I mean markets -- Informa Markets, Informa, generally, we've got some fantastic brands. And I think we can do much more with them. And we're certainly learning that from the Ascential team. That experience, that focus on creating a really outstanding experience as well as must attend is a great opportunity for us.

I think having something on the beach obviously really helps as well. So I certainly enjoy going to Cannes. Andy, I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Yes. I mean Patrick said most of what I was going to say. But I think when I turned up to Money20/20 for the first time to see it and realized it was this incredibly theatrical experience and the idea of creative directors who control the look and the feel and the brand doesn't happen in my business historically.

We tend to bring the bits together fantastically well. They coordinate brilliantly, but they're a bit commercial. And I would want someone to walk away from my event and say, "God, I love that event." Using the word love. That's what brands do for you. We've got a bit of a journey to do. Some of them, there's no doubt they do that, but that's where we aspire to get. And I think the confidence to invest in those qualities and build them, which is what Matthieu's team is doing and will do, will be fantastic for all of us.

Amazing. And we touched on there a bit about international expansion. So where are we on that journey, do you think? Matthieu, do you want to start?

So as I said, geo is one of the key building block of the growth framework for all of us. I'm personally and I speak on behalf of my team when I say that we're all very, very excited about this. As I said, we've had a really great example this year already with the launch of Money20/20 in KSA with Annabel, Mike and our partners from Tahaluf. Our customers loved it, our partners loved it, the teams working on it loved it. It was a great example of taking a great brand in a completely new market and just making a big splash.

So as I said, I've got the privilege of working with a portfolio of amazing brands, pretty much all of them with global relevance, but not all of them with a global footprint. So yes, this is something we're actively working on. You can think Lions, you can think GDC, you can think Black Hat, we're looking at all of those opportunities and actively pursuing them. More to come.

Amazing. Andy?

I'm going to flip it back the other way actually by using SuperReturn as an example because SuperReturn, you saw it's got 24, 27 events, how many losing track of it. It's across many, many geographies already. We've got East and Western U.S.A. We've got across Europe. We've got East and West Africa. We've got Japan. We've got Hong Kong. We've got Singapore. We've got it pretty much everywhere, and we've diversified from private equity into private capital, into secondaries, infrastructure, a whole range of things.

So when Stephen does his chart, we've actually gone along that journey phenomenally well. And we're probably 8x bigger than we were back in 2014 because we've ticked all those boxes. But then the issue we haven't ticked and beat, we are not preeminent in the U.S. So perversely, it's America, the biggest market we've got to focus back on and actually make a bigger impact there, and that will be hopefully part of our plans going forward. But the Life Science and Tech businesses do have to expand. So they will be expanding, and we've got plans to move across geographically as we go forward in those 2 areas.

Amazing. Patrick, anything to add?

Not much to add. I mean we have the huge benefit of fantastic brands working across some really spectacular end markets by way of category. And we've -- with that global reach that we have, we have the opportunity to take those brands both geographically and by category to different places in different formats. We've done some of that, but I think we can certainly do more, and it is our intention to do more.

Amazing. And we heard a little bit earlier today about One Informa. So it would be great to hear about what that means to you. Patrick?

I'd focus on 2 things. I think -- or maybe 3, certainly the ability to bring products and services to markets faster through One Informa to take friction out of the customer experience. And I think having more common platforms enables you to have more common ways of working, which is a scale benefit for us, but also a benefit in terms of colleague mobility, for example, we've seen a significant increase in the last years and focus on internal mobility around the company, which enables us to learn and share best practice. I think One Informa will facilitate that also.

Amazing.

I agree with all of that. The thing that I really hope comes out of One Informa, I mean, I've had previous careers in Unilever and Diageo. Unilever is very well known for a marketing company. Diageo, when I joined part of the Guinness and Grand Met merger, decided it would create the Diageo way of brand building, and it transforms the performance of their business.

I think we've got to be phenomenal at our marketing within Informa. And I really hope and believe this is going to move us to the next level, having common platforms, best practice sharing academies, training people up. And I think that's going to make a significant difference to our performance.

Exciting. Matthieu, what about you?

So I think of One Informa as a really exciting -- maybe a little bit overdue, if I may say, being the newest member of the team here, but exciting investment -- transformation investment program. Effectively, we're looking at building, in my language, a more consistent more efficient, better performing backbone, enabling our businesses across the board to get better service at lower cost in technology, in GBS, in customer service, in data analytics and -- that's a plumbing part of it, which I think is really critical and a big change, maybe overdue.

But building on Patrick and his point, the culture piece, there's an amazing culture Informa. That's one of the reasons I'm here. But that's one Informa, I really believe is an additional culture multiplier, same agenda, same platforms, same mobility, same career opportunities, same talent management, et cetera. So the plumbing is exciting because it's an unlock, but the culture is a multiplier as well.

Sounds fantastic. Now you just touched on there on excitement. So as my final question before we hand back to Stephen for questions. What are you most excited about for the year ahead? Matthieu?

Well, we've all said and Stephen will reinforce, I'm sure that 2025 has been a good year. But when I stand back from it all, what's exciting for me is I think Informa is very much at the start of this growth journey, not at the end, it's very much the start, building on everything we've talked about.

Andy?

I'm going to go back to AI. I think AI is going to be a fantastic capability enhancer, especially in sales and especially in marketing. And my connector during town hall today about the opportunities from AI. And I want everyone to believe that they can be better at their jobs, and they will be better at their jobs because of it. I really think it will transform our ability to resell, collect new business, to all of the key things in sales and marketing going forward. And I think that's going to be a game changer for us.

I absolutely agree with you. Patrick, how about you?

I think, look, growth and opportunity. It's going to be great to look forward and see further growth. And that growth creates opportunity for our customers, for our colleagues and for our investors. I think that's very exciting, and that's what I'm looking forward to.

Amazing. Thank you very much. Thank you.

Okay. Who wants to ask a question? Any question? We have a couple of mics. You go wherever you choose. That means I don't have to favor anyone. No, no, not him.

A couple of where are you questions, if I can. I think the first one we've discussed a little bit in the past. Where do you feel you are -- maybe one for you, Stephen, in terms of percentage completion or wherever in finding the right equilibrium on the pure price within your events, both on the exhibitor side, but also it sounds today like you're increasingly seeing maybe an opportunity on the attendee side?

And then secondly, and I guess we've seen a bit of this in the demo sessions, but how early or how far down the path do you feel you are with regards to using that first-party data to drive up yield?

Thanks, George. I'll give you an answer and then maybe throw it to anyone else on the panel who wants to come in.

I would say on price, I mean this is how I cut into your question. I think it's -- some of you were investors and George, you know our business very well. If you were around this industry in 2020, I mean, it was existential. The one -- I mean I was slightly joking in my presentation, but only just. There were lots of people who were convinced that face-to-face events would not come back or if they came back, they would come back in a de minimis form, in a de minimis form.

So when the market returned not with sort of acceptance, but with enthusiasm, I think that then allowed the industry to reassess its -- the industry, not just Informa, to reassess its whole position on price to value. And so I think it gave the industry an injection of confidence that actually customers were voting with their feet and their wallet. Inside Informa, we use that to really build some capability. So I would say we feel confident now that pricing is a skill set within the business and that there's much more we can do with it.

I don't know, Patrick, Andy, do you want to comment on that? Go Patrick.

I think we've done a reasonable job of pricing since we came out of COVID. We've been, I think, conservative on that. First priority was to recover compound inflation, which I think by the end of 2025, generally across Informa Markets, we will have done. We've learned a lot, and we've built a capability within the business on pricing to be going forward much more sophisticated about it, much more targeted about it.

And just touching on the attendee pricing, which I think was on one of the earlier slides, Informa Markets is, relatively speaking, generating much less revenues from a much bigger base on attendee pricing, but we are making progress on that. As Stephen said, it follows value. Two side benefits of pricing for attendees in Informa Markets. One is that you get to know more about the attendee, which is really helping in terms of our first-party data. And secondly, you have a much greater propensity from registration to turning up if you've paid. So it's delivering those benefits as well. So we're very keen to develop it further. Andy?

Yes. I think every single event, we turn price to value. We try and find out what is the key value we offer our customers. And in my area, it might be sort of frictionless networking. And it's quite easy to work out whether we're delivering that through measuring and monitoring as we go through, interviewing our customers afterwards.

But we had the conversation you and I a month or so again, Stephen, what's the most valuable thing for VIPs in this world, it's their time. And if you help them do their business in a more fluid, frictionless way and give them what they want, the price can go up and up and up. If you start under delivering on that, you'll have a problem. So we have to deliver to that value as well as pricing to value.

On first-party data to your second question, I would say we have done -- we've made a lot of progress on base level capability, collection, standardization, form structure. We've made good progress in sales, but I agree with Andy's point on the stage that there's more we can do in combining first-party data and AI capability just to make our sales capabilities much more effective.

On marketing, I think there's a real prize there for us on a better use. I mean one of the -- it's now become a subject of discussion in many places, but one of the many strengths of our business, including Penny's business and Gary's business, is we're not super dependent upon referred traffic. We never really were because we have a primary relationship with our authors, with our researchers, with our attendees, with our delegates, with our exhibitors. And in Informa TechTarget, we're a significant content owner. So therefore, we're quite happy with primary or unintermediated audience referral. So that's less of a threat to our business than it is in many other areas and first-party data is part of that. There were some other hands up.

Will Larwood from Berenberg. Firstly, just you've spoken about pricing volume and yield before being 1/3, 1/3, 1/3 in this new 6% growth phase. Does that change, particularly in relation to the comments around pricing?

Secondly, you highlighted a number of sort of global gateway cities. Going forward, can we expect, particularly given the supply coming on, can we expect to see more JVs being signed? Or do you expect it to be more developed on sort of organic -- purely on an organic basis?

And then finally, just in terms of the Middle East region, obviously, that has been a key growth driver over the last couple of years. Sort of what can we expect in terms of growth rates for that region going forward?

Great questions. Let me have a pop at the second and the third and maybe anyone on the stage come back in on the price yield volume mix. On the second, which was JVs, I mean, you may have heard us say this before, partnerships is part of our business model. I mean it's sort of inherent in what we do. In fact, it's not sort of. It's inherent in what we do.

I mean, in Penny's business, we take somebody's work and then we validate it, authenticate it and then we publish and distribute and we support it. But it's essentially a partnership between the publisher and the author or the researcher or the institution. In the B2B events business, we create a stage sometimes literally, but definitely metaphorically for buyers and sellers, importers, exporters, wholesalers, distributors to meet.

I mean Informa is visible, but you'll notice this when you go to the Dubai Airshow tomorrow, you'd be hard-pressed to know it was our show, and I'm really good with that. Our success as a business is that actually we're really good at creating partnerships where the people who are at the front of the camera are the customer or in the B2B business, the industry because that's what creates the dynamic where we can do what we do and we take a fair share of our value. And that goes back to George's question, over time, I think that will allow us to price and enhance our yield.

So for us, it's a natural extension of that set of facts that is there an efficient -- what's the most efficient way of getting into a market? So let's take China as an example. We're in China essentially in 3 ways. We have a wholly owned business. We have a business that we own the majority of, but the founder of the business still owns 30% of it and actually doesn't trade under Informa. It doesn't trade on Informa Markets, it trades under Sinoexpo.

And then we have a portfolio of joint ventures where we have 8, 9 joint ventures of varying different shapes, which trade under multiple different names. In Saudi Arabia, we own the majority of the business, but it trades under Tahaluf, it's Informa Group company, but it's a different name. We have 12, 15 partnerships with trade associations where we bought their show and we own some all. Always the majority, but never necessarily 100%. We've got a joint venture with the principality of Monaco where they own 10%, we own 90%, but we run it absolutely as a joint venture.

I could go on. I mean -- and here, we have the emerging possibility of OneCo, where we'll be -- again, we'll own the majority, but it will be absolutely a joint venture partnership. Each of those we've done because it's enabled us to go somewhere quicker at a lower cost and a higher return than if we'd had to use 100% of our own capital to get there, not because we were capital constrained, but it was the most effective way of building the business.

I'm not saying that because I'm preconfiguring there are 3 more tomorrow. I'm not. But we're not uncomfortable with it in any way, shape or form. I think we're good at it. I think we understand how to do it. It doesn't mean we're patsies, speak to any of our partners, they would tell you that.

And I always say we only really have 3 criteria for partnership arrangements. Number one, we always have to be in the majority, not because we're control for each, in fact, we're not, but it just makes life simpler. Number two, we have to like each other. Not we have to like them or they have to like us. We have to like each other because to whoever asked the cultural question, ours is a people business, you need to get on with each other. There's no point in having a partnership where you hate each other or you just trust each other. And thirdly, we both know we're going to make more money doing it together than we would do it separately. If you can line those 3 things up, you can create as many partnerships as you like, and we're very happy to do so.

Your second question was on -- sorry, your third question was on?

Middle East.

Middle East, what will the growth rates be? Higher than 6%. The first question on pricing, yield, volume, what's the mix going to be in '26 to '28, what do you think? 1/3, 1/3, 1/3 or more price, more yield, more volume?

I think 1/3, 1/3 and 1/3. I mean I'd be very comfortable if yield and volume was a greater proportion than price, not because price is going down, but because the other 2 are going up faster.

I think that's the secret sauce. Patrick, as often gets it spot on. I mean it's not that we are -- we want to be conservative about pricing, but the real price is to drive up your yield and your volume because then the value is inherent to your customer and there's more demand. If you do that, the price will follow. Andy, Matthieu, anything?

Nothing to add.

No. Next question. The lady at the back, if we could. Why don't you -- you've got the mic. You got the mic go.

It's Ciaran Donnelly from Citi. Two for me. One, maybe, Stephen, first, in your presentation, you talked about the market structurally growing. I guess, could you help us kind of put some numbers around that? And then I guess, in the context of your 6% kind of target, how ambitious is that 6%? I guess one of your peers is growing their exhibitions business at kind of 8%. So what could be that delta to kind of tick up that 6%, maybe 7%, 8% or more?

And then two, maybe one for the panel. If we think of kind of the events outside of top 50, what are some events that could be in that top 50 in kind of 3 to 5 years? And maybe why are they particular standouts in the portfolio?

That's a great question. I'm interested in the answer to that. So 3 ideas each. Look, our business is going to grow this year at nearly 9%. So don't misinterpret our, if you like, our kind of base level compound sort of promissory note to the market with the ceiling of our ambition. It's a floor, not a ceiling. But what we're trying to say from an investment point of view is there is a base level of compound value here, which actually today isn't manifesting itself in our price.

You then have to make your own judgment about what the ambition performance might be on top of that. But that's -- even at that level, at 6%, that's 3x what it was 8, 9 years ago. So it's not like it's not a step-up. And what we're saying is we're laying that out over a 3- to 4-year period. So that's the way I would cut into that. But we're not saying that, that is -- that's the kind of end of the runway.

How important will supply be? To the actual percentage growth, probably not that much in absolute terms because we're already filling millions of square meters, but it's relevant to volume and demand. And it also is relevant slightly to the prior question around partnerships because it then maintains this sort of city competition, which is good for our business. So it's good to see new capacity, not just because it's more volume, but it generally sort of in that sense, I say this because I wandered around an airplane this morning on the runway as you might tomorrow.

It's -- when you've got new rolling stock, if you like, new capacity, it means the existing capacity has to up its game, too. So just generally, to the point that Patrick and Matthieu make about just -- and Andy about improving the actual experience of the product, you want your capacity to be good capacity. It's not just the volume. It's the nature of the capacity. So I think new stock is always good for any industry because it serves to define the experience a bit.

So definitely, we'll fill it. And in places like here and in a couple of other markets I could name, we're probably the lead contender to fill it. So that's good. But I think it also ups the quality of the experience for customers, and that takes us back to yield and volume.

Okay, which are the 3 that are in the next 450 that are going to be in the top 50 in 3 years, what we reckon?

Definitely, wellness, longevity brand.

Yes. Wellness and longevity.

Yes.

You're only giving one?

Well, I thought I'd let the others have a go.

Matthieu?

Well, for me, again, I'm blessed with the portfolio where most of the brands are already large-scale brands with the exception of the Tech Week portfolio. That's London Tech Week, Africa Tech Week and Asia Tech Week. And those are great brands, great product, a little bit subscale. So we're doing a lot of work to really scale them up. We know the market is there. We have competitors doing great, including here. So that's the opportunity for scaling up.

Data Center World as well.

[indiscernible] Patrick?

It's a bit like picking favorite children, and I've got quite a few of those as well. And my favorite changes on a regular basis. So I'm not going to pick a particular show other than to say, I think the shows where we can really bring the brand and the experience at a heightened level are going to be the ones that really accelerate and will add to that sort of super brand cast.

I was looking at one of the brands actually yesterday, Newtopia, and it has a fantastic product called Beacon.

It's a food product. It's a food brand.

If you get the chance, I would look at it, really bringing experience, data, product capability, discovery, buyers and sellers, new buyers and sellers and improving the productivity, the efficiency for buyers. And that's the sort of innovation that I think is really powerful.

Yes. Great question. Next question, lady at the back.

Annick Maas from Bernstein. So my first one is you said that shows are going to move from transactional shows to experience and content-driven, and you've suggested that, that's an opportunity for attendee revenue growth. Does that come with other revenue opportunity or monetization avenues? And if so, which ones would that be? The second one is, I guess you don't want to tell us how much EMEA growth is doing in B2B events. But can you maybe tell us how you build up the 6%?

I'm thinking, is that including China coming back? Or is there no optionality for that baked in? How do you think about it? And then my last one is of the top 50 brands, quite a few of them have been around for a long time. What's the average age of the top 50 portfolio versus the rest? Because I guess you have very strong brands, but it takes time to build a brand.

Great questions. Who wants to go first?

What was the first one again?

So if there are new opportunities as shows pure transaction, they become more experiential.

How else can you monetize it?

Yes, how else can you monetize it?

Yes. I mean, as Stephen said, look, as the industry and the overall trend moves from -- on the chart, if you remember, from left to right, there's definitely more opportunities to monetize, to innovate and for us to monetize more products and services. And back to pricing, that allows us to sell a solution and a bundle as opposed to just one product. But those could be anything from inventory asset space, but not just in the venue, also outside of the venue. It could be content stages. It could be sponsorship products.

It could be leveraging our IP to package subscription or media products. There's a whole range of amplification services, which is why I mentioned in the -- in what I'm excited after penetration, geo, all of this bucket of amplification is packaging solutions, innovating products and selling our customers something that they wouldn't be able to get from anyone else.

I'll expand on a little bit. Research we've done with our customers says that for every pound they spend or dollar they spend in our event, they invest another $0.25 or another dollar trying to amplify and attract people to their activities, their presentations, their booths. That's what we call event amplification.

Now they've done that by checking information, trying to talk to people they think are going to come to the event. That's where the first-party data comes. We know precisely who's turning up to the event. And we can tag them with all of our information from IIRIS, from all of their interactions with any content we do, and we can market more precisely to the people they want to talk to at an event.

There's a huge opportunity there for extra revenue around what we call event amplification, which is based on IIRIS, based on fantastic content and tagging and it's all first-party data related. And they've admitted to us, they can't do it anywhere near as well as we can. And we're starting on that journey. It's a small number at the moment, but it's growing very rapidly.

Patrick, do you want to comment on the first or second question?

On the -- as we make that transition to more experiential, where does the -- where the additional revenue opportunities, obviously, on attendee pricing from formal markets, as we provide more content, more education, more learning, then we have the opportunity to price for that value.

Also on the back of that, I would cite a product actually invented -- created in Andy's business called Lead Insights, which as we generate more intelligence about the audience, more knowledge about what they do both before the show, during the show and after the show, we're building up fantastic insight into the audience and their intentions as buyers. And that's hugely valuable, as I said, created, invented in Andy's business and now being rolled out to informal markets.

On your other 2 points, I was just trying to bring up -- I mean, one of the big differences, it's an obvious difference, but it's worth dwelling on because I think it's relevant to your line of questioning, if I understand it, between the B2B event industry in my kind of live thesis and sports or entertainment theater is there are no media rights.

So -- which is where a lot of the monetization value comes in those businesses. And the monetization value in media rights also speaks to the point that Patrick is making around yield because which comes first, the media rights deal or the price of a Formula 1 ticket, I mean, discuss.

Obviously, we don't have media rights. And that, I think, takes you back to content and experiential. So you really have to make the event multidimensional because you don't have the reliance of a secondary or tertiary provider of context. You've got to create the context. And Matthew made this point in answer to one of Penny's questions, which is one of the things that we definitely learned from, I would say, more the Cannes Lions team than the essential team was the value of taking over an entire location rather than a venue.

And for those of you who have been at Cannes, one of the things that people go there for the first time often say is I never went into the convention center or I didn't go in very much because actually, the event doesn't really take place at the convention center. Most of our events take place at the venue, not all of them though.

And so capturing the broader environment is kind of our version of a media right. It helps you to contextualize and the richer the content and the contextualization, that's directly correlated to value. And we see that most in our delegate businesses. It's directly correlated to value. So the more we can do that, the more it is.

I just went down your top 50, you're 100% right. 5 of them are under 5 years old, only 5 of the 50. And 2 of those are in Saudi. And one of those used an existing brand name in Money20/20. LEAP is probably the only brand that is a complete brand creation from scratch. The others are in some way, shape or form, an iteration of something else. So what does that tell you? It tells you 1 or 2 things, either one, we're desperately uncreative. That is obviously not true. Or it tells you number two, it's really hard to do, which it is.

So you've really got to work in partnership with a location, a venue, a city, a government, a trade association, and it goes back to the [ gentleman's ] question around partnerships because that's hard to do on its own. I mean, I think I'm not misrepresenting. Annabelle has got more ownership rights of LEAP than I do. But I would say we would not have created LEAP without a deeply embedded partnership with the Ministry of Communications and Technology in Saudi Arabia.

We could not have done that on our own. I think they would say they could not have done it on their own either, but it was absolutely founded out of a partnership. But -- so it's not impossible to do, but it's hard to do. But the real question for us is, can we find them because then I looked at the others.

There are 14 of those in here, which we bought and are infinitely better now than they were when we bought them. And that's another way of creating a real mega brand. Next question. Well, there's 2 in the front row. And the gentleman there with [indiscernible].

Could I have 2, please? First of all, just on the compounding growth theme, you've not mentioned cyclicality at all and sort of global GDP. It feels like you couldn't have much more thrown at you in the last year or 2 in terms of geopolitical, macros and stuff like that, and the business has continued to grow. So just I'd be interested in your overall view of that and maybe the panels in the different parts of the business. So that's the first question.

And the second question, I'm just interested in your view, the Dubai deal feels a bit unusual in a venue owner effectively doing a partnership on the operating side. So not keeping the operating side and the venue together is kind of unusual. We've seen a recent deal in Germany as well, a smaller deal where that happened as well and potentially talking about doing other partnerships.

So my question really is, if you took your 10% of the TAM that venue owner operated, is there any kind of trend that's going against that now that might give an opportunity? Or are these kind of one-off type things?

Both great questions. Let me -- I'll try and answer the second and come in on the first and maybe Patrick and Andy can come in on the first as well because they've got the most geographically diverse portfolios, I would say. We have one other venue partnership actually or partnership with a venue owner, and that's in Italy, where we have a partnership with BolognaFiere, who also like here in Dubai, they own a venue and they also own a trade show business, which they run separately.

And similarly, as here, they have kind of Chinese walls or maybe Italian walls between the venue business and the event business. And we have that because they own a mega brand, a bit like Dubai does in Gulf Food. They own a mega brand called Cosmoprof, which in the beauty trade show business is a global brand. And we have a partnership with them everywhere else where we deliver Cosmoprof in 7 or 8 other markets. So it's actually quite analogous.

And there, so we have a joint venture. I mean, this is more than you need to know, really, Steve or anyone else does. We have a joint venture and also we are an investor in the holding company. So we actually have an equity stake. So our partnership there, slightly to go back to the other question is really very different.

We've talked to some of the other venue owners around the world. It's very bespoke because the authority levels vary a lot. I think that's probably about as far as I could go. Sometimes you're dealing with someone who's a decision maker, but oftentimes, you're dealing with someone who is -- whose job it is to run the venue for an agenda that's very particular to City X or City Y or City Z.

And I think one of the building blocks of our partnership in Dubai that gives me a lot of optimism is that I think you got a sense of earlier is there's a shared sense of there's a world to fill as well as there's a venue and a location to fill in Dubai. Trixie and the team in DWTC and our team here in Dubai and in Turkey and in India and in Egypt, we've got great brands. We can take those brands into other places. We can also bring more IP here, but it's a 2-way flow.

It's not simply a -- could you bring more audience just to location X. It's a richer conversation. If that answers your question. On GDP, here's my commentary and then Patrick and Andy are near the point end of the plane of this than I am. And I'm conscious that I'm talking to a room and a streaming audience who do this for a living. One of the things I think we've managed to do is get to a point whereby we have a portfolio that allows us to manage through volatility. And you're 110% right, Steve.

If I showed you the budget that we wrote in November of last year, it is not the numbers we delivered in November of this year. But the outcome is in the territory that we wanted it to be because we have spread. Now as all of you who are portfolio managers will know far better than me, the day you dream of is the day when everything in your portfolio is firing on all cylinders, but that doesn't generally tend to happen.

So this year, China has been tepid for us, as you know. It's been tepid for many people. It hasn't been terrible, but it's been tepid. America has been good, but not spectacular, not spectacular. The Middle East has been spectacular or EMEA, in fact, has been spectacular. South America has been spectacular. Southeast Asia has been spectacular. Here's a surprising stat.

Europe has been spectacular because our European revenues are actually not European revenues in the main. They are big brands that happen in Europe because that's where the industry goes to meet, but they're not really causally connected to the GDP volatility or lack of in the European market.

So I'm slightly connecting your question or my answer to your earlier question about the 6%. What we're trying to give the market is, obviously, we understand that markets are volatile. Even with that volatility, we think we've built a business that's got enough freight, enough stability, enough spread, enough diversity to be able to ride through that. Now could we do better than that? Of course, we want to do better than that, but that's the base level of performance.

To the point on cyclicality really and disruption, 3 points to make. Firstly, you might think in difficult times, there's more reason to come to a trade show to transact because it's more important. Secondly, I think disruption creates the need to find new supply chains, new suppliers. So it's not necessarily a bad thing in the medium to long term. And thirdly, is the point I made earlier that you're booking next year's show at this show. So quite often, you're committed when before that disruption really impacted.

Andy?

Yes. We haven't felt huge cyclicality, but Patrick's answer is perfect. But where we've seen is where budgets change unpredictably, what you have is maybe 5 people turn up instead of 10. So there's nothing wrong with the show in its own right. The most important thing is to give a great experience to make sure that next year, when the budgets are replaced, that we're going to have a better show. So it's playing around the margins. But then on the positive side, being really agile to spin out something really, really quickly.

So Data Center World was in May. We knew it was hot. We decided to launch a new show for October at the May show. And people know Connect, we have the millionaire club but all shows over 1 million, and it came straight in over 1 million. Run up by the team really, really fast. So agility to look at the better opportunities as well as covering off for some of the downsides. I think that's the portfolio argument that Stephen put forward.

Last question, and then we're going to take a comfort break, cup of tea and...

Yes. Nick Dempsey from Barclays. I just one to get you into the break. Just following on from Steve's question on cyclicality, actually, we heard to say about ambitions for increasing attendee revenues probably at a good rate, and therefore, they might increase in the mix. Am I right in thinking that attendee revenues were much, much more cyclical back in 2009. And therefore, if you expand those, that increases your cyclicality?

Attendee revenues. I think delegate revenues were a bigger proportion of our revenue in 2009. I think that would be true.

And they were vulnerable because of the Internet for the reason you...

And yes, they were vulnerable for different reasons because there was an alternative product, which was cheaper and easier to use and better. I think what we're talking about on attendee revenues is a different mix because it's either correlated to the content being such that you can price for it or the actual event has got enough commercial value that you don't have to rely on the exhibitors to pay for the attendees to turn up for free that actually the attendees themselves are willing to have some skin in the game.

But I mean, let's put it into context. We do it today. What's our pricing range on attendee pricing, $50 to...

GBP 5,000 plus, GBP 5,000.

So it's a spread. It depends very much on the product.

But for networking also, Stephen, they know they're going to meet the people they need to meet. So that's worth paying for as well.

Okay. I think I'm being given the eye by Richard. So the plan is we take a break, sorry, 30-minute break. So it is -- according to my watch, it is 10 to 5. So back here on the hour, if we could, at 5:00. There's tea and coffee outside. Sorry, 30 minutes, I think you said 10. 20 past 5. I don't know what I'm talking about. We take 20 past 5.

If you're on the live stream, we'll be back in 30 minutes. That's 20 past 5 Dubai time, which will be 20 past 1 U.K. time, and I run out of time zone knowledge at that point. And so there's tea, coffee and then some more product demonstrations if you want to.

All right. I'd just like to start by thanking Stephen and Richard, not only for inviting me, but for making me put on a suit for the first time in 2 years. Just in terms of the themes and the takeaways today, I mean, really going to hopefully get across 3 things. Firstly, scale; secondly, growth and particularly around brands and the venue situations. And then finally, the culture in that B2B exhibitions are very much ingrained in the culture of the region and seen really much as a platform for the execution of their vision.

But I'd just like to take a second and talk about scale. Stephen showed a few interesting slides just to pick up on. The first one is that Informa is #1 in the world for exhibitions, and that's happened over a 10-year period. And not only is it #1, but it's twice the size of Reed, who are #2. And then EMEA, IMEA, in terms of scale, if IMEA was a separate company, it would be the third largest organizer in the world.

So that just gives you a feel of the scale of the businesses that these 5 gentlemen and ladies run. And I'd really like to start off talking about brands. And I'm going to come to Peter and then Annabelle and talk about the old and the new, and that's not a reflection of their ages. But the perception is that Dubai is a very sort of young exhibition market.

And Helal briefly talked in his introduction, it's over 40 years. It actually started in 1976 with a company called F&E that actually created 2 global brands that have then come into Informa by way of different acquisitions. Dubai Air Show, which you'll all see tomorrow. And then secondly, Arab Health. And Arab Health has now been rebranded as WHX. But do you want to talk a little bit about the evolution of a global brand that's originated in Dubai and is now being exported around the world?

Yes, of course. Thanks, Doug. And actually, I think you missed one because Middle East Energy was also launched by F&E. It was -- because IIR at the time bought Arab Health and MEE 30 years ago, which is really right at the first establishment of our business here in Dubai. But these events -- I love this story because Arab Health actually was one of the first events in Dubai.

It was launched on the banks of the Creek in a tent and probably only had about 40 exhibitors, but they were international exhibitors. And it was launched on the basis of Sheikh Rashid's vision for trade and commerce. And so Bill [ Kern ], obviously, was the founding entrepreneur that launched that event.

We then ran the event for 30 years under the Arab Health name, but it really did become far more than just an Arab sort of Middle Eastern show. It was a genuine international globally important trade show. And so to celebrate its 50th year, we took the bold move because by then, we've actually taken our health care portfolio all over the world. So we had Arab Health here in Dubai.

And then we had also bought events in other parts of the world. We bought an event in Miami. That was called FIME, a health care event, which we ran from Dubai. We launched events in East and West Africa, South Africa. We had launched in Egypt. We launched in Thailand. We launched in Saudi.

And we had other offshoots. We also spun off another event from Arab Health called Medlab. But all of these events were called different things, and they were Medic East Africa, Medic West Africa, Africa Health in South Africa, FIME in Miami, Medic Asia, I think, was the name of the show in Thailand. But it all come from the international connections that we had from Arab Health and the real hub, the real centerpiece of the portfolio was always Arab Health.

So over those 30 years, we've developed into very much the market leader and the international sort of bellwether for health care events. And to celebrate the 50th anniversary, we were really very much looking on what's the next 50 years going to look like and how do we position this event for what it truly is a World Health Expo.

And so we took a fairly bold move of taking a 50-year-old brand and changing its name to WHX, World Health Expo. And we were then able to change the brand of all of our other events around the world, WHX, Cape Town, WHX, Miami, WHX, Lagos, WHX, Nairobi.

And we're now on starting a new journey of really building a new global brand off the base of what was a very established individual brand, and now we have a portfolio. So -- and I think the timing of that was perfect because we had a lot of momentum in the product. We had a lot of goodwill from the international exhibitors that support the show. I think it was a logical move.

It made sense for us to be called World Health Expo. We were very much setting our stall out as being the world's leading health care exhibition and in Dubai. We actually, on the second day of the show when we did the brand switch, we -- live at the show, we went from Arab Health into WHX.

And that evening, we lit up the Burj Khalifa with the WHX branding. And we had all sorts of activations across Dubai. And it was just really timing, it was -- execution was first class. And then we've really had to spend the rest of this year delivering that brand and continuing to deliver the message of WHX.

And I don't think it will really come to life fully until February next year when we run the events at the new exhibition center, and we're really going to go to town with the World Health Expo. And obviously, the whole market, the whole world of health care professionals will be there, and they'll really start to understand what that new brand really means. But it's extraordinary how it's been picked up by the community.

I think it's a fantastic case study of actually how Dubai is positioning itself, not just as regional but as global.

This is it.

Annabelle, moving to the new. And I can say I've been in this industry 33 years, and I've never seen a business built of such scale in such a short period of time, just over 3 years. And it's been the geocoding of certain brands, and it's been the launching of new brands. Do you just want to talk through that sort of journey because it's been rapid in that short period of time.

Yes. So for those of you who aren't too familiar with Tahaluf, we officially launched in November 2022, and we've had a lot of accelerated growth. Some of that has been bringing informers incredible IPs that work well around the world to Saudi Arabia, ensuring they work for the local market. And some of them has been co-creating brands with strong Saudi partners.

And when we look to co-create these brands, there's a few key elements that we'll consider. We'll look at the market conditions, is the sector supporting Vision 2030? And are we working with the right government partner? And if we take LEAP because I guess this was really our big defining moment, when we created LEAP, we came with the approach of how do we do this differently from what already exists in the market. And we coined this term, which is probably a bit silly, but we coined it [indiscernible].

And everything that we did, we went back to and we said, do we want this to be just another tech event or just another exhibition or do we want this to be something that's world-class that can compete with the web summits and VivaTechs.

So when we were building this brand, we had our bread and butter, which was the buyers, the investor program, the speakers. And then each year, we began to elevate that brand. So this year at Leap, we have an investor program of over 1,600 investors, 1,000 speakers, 25 conference tracks and over 200 events that take place across the city of Riyadh as part of LEAP Week.

So we've really built on this brand. And once we kind of understood, we call it the secret sauce, we've been able to replicate that within different sectors. And we're very conscious at Tahaluf to launch brands in new sectors and strategic sectors as we've seen time and time again how market conditions can really impact the growth of certain events.

So rather than being reliant just on, let's say, LEAP in tech or Cityscape and real estate, we're expanding into broader markets. So launching into new sectors like biotech, water, physical security and a few with hopefully Matthew's team that I won't mention because I think I'll get in trouble. So a real mix of utilizing Informa's amazing brands and creating our own brands.

And LEAP is actually the oldest brand within our portfolio. We're turning 5 in April. So that's one of the ways that we're looking at growth is diversifying the sectors that we operate in. We should have around 30 brands next year. And then we're also doing other key things like expanding into new markets, international markets, investing in the product, ticketing and investing in the team.

Thank you. I mean it's a fascinating story with what you've achieved in such a short period of time. Yogesh, I mean, if I go to India next and CPHI is seen as the dominant brand in the Indian market. But actually, the portfolio is a lot bigger than that. you've most recently added the HIV portfolio. Can you just talk about actually how the portfolio has developed and how the brands have developed in India?

Sure. Thanks, Doug. And I think we launched in India as a business, if I go back as a history, we will be completing 20 years next year. So that's quite a significant amount of time. That's when the sector opened up for 100% FDI, and that's when we started launching. And CPHI, as you know, has been our largest show we are known. But at the moment, if you look at it, we are doing about 26 shows this year in 16 different verticals, right, from pharma to food to energy, to travel, to jewelry to a lot.

So I think we are in so many sectors. I think the thing is India story is a bit of a -- it's entire reverse of what's happened in Saudi. It's -- for us, it's been more of a persistent growth. We were the early entrants. We got the benefit of staying there, persisting there year-on-year, investing in our products. So first 5 to 6 years was not easy, of course, as business.

But then I think persistently pumping in money into marketing, building that relationships with the government. So we have developed quite a good level of connections with various government departments, be it the Ministry of Commerce, Ministry of Tourism. I think that really helped us building those relationships with key associations, export promotion councils over there. So that helped us.

And the best part is Informa, the power of brands that we have. So most of our shows, which we are doing in India are geo-adopts, which have a global fan following. There are so many Indians who travel to all these global shows. So what strategy we adopted over the last 10, 12 years was to bring those brands into India and launch them. And we have really probably, I would say, have to an extent, succeeded in that formula of launching geo-adopts well and making them grow in India.

I mean just switching to Turkey now. I mean it's a different market. You're a regional hub you've got a very dynamic culture of face-to-face and exhibitions are hugely important. But it differs from a lot of markets and it's heavily export orientated.

And you've got some great brands, obviously [indiscernible], you've got jewelry as 2 big examples. Just want to talk about actually that export culture and what is driving that sort of regional hub.

I mean when we first started in Turkey, when I first started industry, I mean, if you had around like 10,000 square meters, 15,000 square meter events, they were supposed to be big events. Now we all have around 30,000, 40,000, 50,000 net square meter events. And this is the result of the Turkey being an export country and manufacturing country because Turkey is have to manufacture and they have to export.

As a result, we are lucky that all of our events are export oriented. And the change we are seeing recently is in the past, most of our exhibitors used to be from Turkey, 90% would be from Turkey. Now we are changing that, and that's where we see the growth also. We are bringing in more international exhibitors to attend our events so that they can sell to the region, the whole region, Eurasia region. And [indiscernible] is a great example for that. It's been increasing more and more.

At the moment, we are almost 35% of international exhibitors. It used to be, like I said, maximum 10% even in the best events. We see the same difference, this change with the growth, with the strength of Informa at the moment, we are using that, and we are seeing that change that more and more internationals are coming into our shows.

And do you think a bit like Dubai, you're seeing market share shift out of Continental Europe that actually Continental Europe is in decline and you're in a growth market like Dubai?

It does. I mean the main reason is the visa problems that people having problems going into Europe and from Eurasia and Turkey is a big hub, easy to come in. Turkish Airlines flying to most of the regions in the world, direct flights that helps us a lot. We have nice hotels and wide range of hotels like Stephen said, we have 3-star, 4-star hotels in Istanbul, and it's a nice place to visit as well as to do the business.

So that's helping us for sure at the moment. And also what we see for growth, in the past, we would only think of our brands being local only in Turkey. But now we are looking at expanding those brands into different regions. For example, for the future, we are looking whether we can bring Growtech, our agriculture event, which is opening tomorrow in Antalya. It's a global regional brand. It's a strong brand, well-known brand. We are moving into Dubai.

And together, we will be working with Shabnam on that and bringing this brand to Dubai. We are also looking at moving into different parts of the world. So it's not only Turkey now because we have strong brands. All of these brands are 30 years, 40 years brands. So these are all long, well-established 30, 40 additions.

I mean we heard from Andy earlier about Connect. It's a different type of business, different model. I mean in terms of being specialist, I mean how are you seeing that model adapt? And where are you seeing the growth from that particular niche that you're serving?

Yes, absolutely. So as you said, we are different, and we are a specialist business. We have an events business, and we have a training business, which is very unique to Informa. And we -- within our events business, if I talk about the events business and the brands that we have within our events business, they're very much fueled by the growth in the sectors that are being driven by the national transformation programs or the economic strategy that Stephen talked about earlier.

And if I give you a couple of examples, take food security, which is a pressing issue in the region. And we recently ran Agro Middle East, which we ran really successfully and address some of those pertinent issues. We're partnering now with -- as Tiller mentioned, we are partnering with Tiller to bring a really well-recognized brand to the region and further scale Agro.

Another example of a brand of capitalizing on the national agenda is the MICE sector. And our event shows, the Middle East event Show and the Saudi event Show have really benefited from this explosion in this MICE sector. And we are now partnering with our colleagues in the U.S. and bringing the global meetings to the region as well as inviting international buyers. So we are -- and we're doing this both in Riyadh and in Dubai. So on the events front, we are capitalizing on the growth. We're doubling down on the growth.

And if I want to -- if I dwell a little bit on the training side, training is red hot in the region. Not many people realize we run over 1,000-plus learning programs here in the region across all industry sectors. And what we do is we partner with leading universities and certification bodies to offer accredited learning programs.

Now there's a real demand within this region to upskill the workforce, and we are capitalizing on that, and we are seeing huge demand. We have the capability, we have the products, we have the partners and to take advantage of this growing and rising demand.

Interesting in terms of like the different model and how it's evolving. We'll come back in terms of actually how that's interacting with what's going on in the different components in the region in a minute. But I just want to go to the second bit that I raised in terms of growth and the opportunities around the venue, Pete, I want to come back to you. And I got asked by an industry commentator as to what did I think of Informa's acquisition of DWTC?

And my comment was, I think it's the cleverest deal I have seen since Informa bought Tarsus. But in all seriousness, I think the industry generally doesn't really understand how clever it is. And why do I say that? I say that because of the fact that it increases the Informa exposure to more volume in Dubai. And why is that important? What you've got is a venue constrained market and excess demand.

And for the analysts out there who actually want to see what happens, a really good case study is to look at what happened in Hong Kong. If you look at the expansion in the mid-'90s and then the new venue in 2005, you don't see incremental growth, you see step change growth. So setting it up now, Pete, in terms of how you're thinking about this extra capacity that's coming on stream, how are you going to change? Or is it just going to be more of the same, but more space?

Well, first of all, we're kind of moving to a 2-venue strategy. So WHX -- so what was Arab Health and what was Medlab used to run concurrently because Medlab was born from Arab Health. It was a medical laboratory exhibition, and we could never run it at the same time as Arab Health. We didn't have the space. So this new opening up of capacity in Dubai is enabling us actually to bring what should have been a bedfellow of Arab Health back into the same week.

So we're now running the labs, WHX Labs, which is the new name for Medlab and WHX Dubai, which is the new name for Arab Health at 2 venues at the same time. We're also expanding both events quite considerably because in the old venue, we were completely at capacity, and we've built all the tents that we could possibly fit on the site. There was no room to grow. Exhibitors for many years have been coming to us asking for more space. We haven't been able to provide that.

Pavilions, country pavilions have for years been asking us for more space, which we have not been able to provide massive pavilions like Germany, U.S., Italy, Turkey, but pretty much every pavilion has been wanting to take more space at the old venue. So now when we've gone to the new venue, we've got a bit of extra capacity there. We're actually also building tents -- 4 tents alongside the new venue because the new venue capacity gives us more space, but we need even more.

So we're building 4 additional tents at the new venue, plus we're running Medlab at the old venue same date. And similar to how Golf Food are going to use both venues at the same time. So not only are we getting growth out of our existing product, we're actually able to create something almost like a new product because visitors to the event can get access to both markets in that same week now.

And so we're having to think very carefully about how we manage the customer experience, how we manage the flow of traffic between the 2 sites. How we actually activate the city of Dubai in between those 2 venues because one is in the north, one is in the South.

So we now see this as being a big opportunity for us to turn on different parts of Dubai for different activations through that week and actually end up going towards World Healthcare Week, which will be a sort of city takeover. So that's the ultimate vision. This is what we sold to Helal when we were first talking about moving the event, changing the name, introducing consumer elements of health care. So the sky is the limit to the opportunity that this creates.

And that's mainly around the existing product. But obviously, it's been very difficult to launch new themes. I mean, is that part of the plan as well to launch themes?

Yes, yes, it is. And the partnership with Dubai will help that as well. But I mean, the bottom line is most of the big exhibitions that currently happen in the old venue will move to the new venue and that will open up all of that capacity at the old venue for us to launch events into that space.

So we've got a number of ideas that we'll be doing that with. Plus there's launches that we've already put into the schedule that are capacity bound, and they'll have opportunity to grow as well.

I mean moving now to Saudi, Annabelle, I was lucky enough to visit Black Hat last year and obviously see the venues that exist there. And to put it politely, there's a lot of room for improvement in terms of putting on more capacity because the demand is coming through very strongly. Do you just want to talk about actually how that's evolving because you have the World Expo coming in 2030. There's a big push in infrastructure and the challenges around that, managing your growth?

So for those of you who haven't been to Riyadh, the Malham Exhibition Center is actually roughly 1 hour out of town. And even with the additional structure that's been built, it's only around 80,000 square meters. Events like LEAP, Global Health Exhibition and Cityscape could easily be 200,000 square meters plus -- plus. So it takes us slightly out of the organizer role into more of a facilities construction manager role as well.

So we have to really invest heavily in the infrastructure at the venue, the amenities because you're coming all the way outside of the city, you need a reason to stay there for the whole entire day as you can't nip in an hour or jump on a train or jump in a metro. So it makes it even more invaluable to invest heavily in our products and in our brands and make sure that the international audience who are flying in from all around the world have a reason to come and travel all the way to Malham.

This is also an opportunity for us because those additional costs associated with scaling the venue, providing amenities, F&Bs, toilets, everything that goes into the larger scale brands, when a new venue does come online and looking towards Expo 2030, that's a huge growth opportunity for us. If we look at LEAP alone, we have nearly 2,000 companies on the waiting list to get in a certain hall within the venue.

So when we have a good venue with good amenities, it's going to allow for huge growth opportunities. So to continue on our growth journey, whilst we have these venue restrictions, we're also launching into new markets. So next year, we're launching in Hong Kong with LEAP East.

This will be fully supported by the government of Saudi Arabia, the government of Hong Kong, and we're also working closely with Mainland China. So you really have the government officials, the policymakers and ministerial level coming together to look at investment opportunities. So although we have venue limitations, there's also opportunity there, and there's definitely growth with our international expansion, too.

Chairman, can I come to you just in terms of my experience of being in Saudi compared to Dubai. In Dubai, you've got a heavy level of service, whether that's in the venues, in the hotels, in the restaurants. But when you go to Saudi, it's a totally different experience. Do you just want to talk about what you're doing as part of Informa in terms of that regional transformation that's going on and in terms of the upskilling and the professional development, which obviously is a key part of your business?

Yes, absolutely. Middle East is one of the fastest-growing learning sectors globally. And our analysis shows that the soft skills market in the GCC is going to triple in the next 10 years and the corporate e-learning market is going to quadruple in the same time frame. And what's driving this growth is the young graduates who are entering the workforce and there is a real demand for upskilling this workforce and our government and businesses are investing heavily in training there workforce and getting them future ready.

So we are seeing this in Saudi. We are expanding our footprint in Saudi and we are actually deepening our presence in Saudi where Informa comes in as we've been operating in the region for over 30 years and we are fully embedded. We are scaled, embedded. We understand the business extremely well. We're coming from a power of -- from position of strength to cater to these needs.

I mentioned earlier, we have highly -- we offer highly acclaimed accredited programs, which are in high demand. And we do this by web partnering with renowned associations and certification bodies. So right now, we are seeing that huge demand in Saudi Arabia. We are seeing that demand in the rest of the GCC as well. But mainly in Saudi, we are actually partnering. We recently signed a partnership with a local government entity to actually scale our operations in Saudi even more. So we'll have a bigger footprint in Saudi.

And I think generally in the region, I mean, I just want to move to India next, Yogesh. Coming back to venues. I mean, I've been operating in India for over 20 years. And every time I go there, we talk about new venues, and it's all going to change. And for me, it's the -- forever the bright made never the bright. And are you going to be the bright now?

If you had asked me this question 5 years back, it was a bit different. But now I think this -- we are seeing a very positive change in this venue scenario in India. I think there are new venues which have come up. Look at the National Capital Region of Delhi, there are 3 good venues in the city itself now. And that's really become a game changer. And in Mumbai now we have a new venue in the heart of the city in BKC. There is a plan of a new venue close to a new airport that's coming up, which is opening up this December for commercial flights.

So land is a 100,000 square meter venue. But the way we are growing at the venue capacities are getting added, I think we should have at least 50% more capacity in the next 3 years, but the shows are getting bigger. I think -- so for example, I think I would love in India to have a venue like what we have in China, in Shanghai, a 400,000 square meter venue because my largest show, CPHI PMEC, we have this year, I'm doing -- running it next week, and it's wall bound end-to-end. I have no space.

So we have to split the show across 2 venues. I would have rather enjoyed keeping that in that one venue so that it gives more value to our customers. So that's the way that the shows are growing pretty fast. And I think the best part is the government in India understands power of B2B. So that's -- they are doing their own sort of B2B programs, events under the Bharat Series. So I think that's really a good sign for us.

In fact, they have now created a policy for B2B exhibitions, especially post-COVID, so to how to promote those B2B. So I think that's a positive sign. So as I said, I think it's much better than what you would have seen in the past 5 years back. I think the situation is very positive, new venues coming up, existing venues are adding capacities.

That's also they are growing. They're building new halls. Some of them, the likes of Nesco in Mumbai, which was an old factory, they're taking down their old halls part by part and building into new fabulous halls. So that's also happening. So I think we are seeing a big change in India right now on the venue front really.

And do you think this venue change will bring more competition because really the serious players are yourselves as Informa and the German. There's not really much else. Do you think that will change because you will just continue because you've got the brands you were in early or there will be new entrants?

No, definitely. I think the existing rates are given to the -- because we are there, we get the preference across others, and we are a long-term partner to most of our venues. The one thing which we have built over the years, it's good long-term partnerships because we do shows across different venues in India. So we normally get that preference in selecting rates and getting those dates in the peak seasons, especially.

That's something which we do. Of course, one constraint which we have in India is one of the venues has a policy of really the lock-in period, so where -- the profile protection. So that's where we have worked on. So most venues have understood that policy. They are now putting at least 30 to 45 days of gap between shows for the profiles.

I mean, [indiscernible], just moving to you. I mean, Istanbul has got some very good venue space there. So it's less a sort of venue capacity issue for you. I was really going to ask you really about your view of growth in a market that's seen constant political turmoil, currency and how the market has continued to grow even with that.

I mean, like you said, there are so many -- we always have ups and downs, but high inflation always affecting us, but that's part of life. If you're doing your business in Turkey, it's your part of your daily life, it's part of the business life. You adapt to it. You change your -- you control your cost base, you change your prices, but everyone does it -- so it's part of your life. So it's naturally there.

And the growth is the good thing is that Turkey is always growing. When you look at throughout 10, 20 years, Turkey has been growing steadily and always over 3%. So that's there. And also exports, like you said before, exports are the biggest part of it and exports are helping us to grow. And our biggest base of customer base is exporting companies. So that help us grow more and more.

And is the concentration still going to be very much in Istanbul as the hub? Or will it go else into more regional markets? Or still that's where the big brands are going to be?

Antalya also have good capacity. For example, we are organizing our Growtech event. That's where the people are, the exhibitors are. So the base is there. So -- and it's a good place to -- Antalya is a good place to visit as well. So we combine both, and we can organize a big event, but still Istanbul will be the best place to go.

I was told by Richard that there might be some questions, and I see some friendly faces there in the audience. Are there any questions that anyone has got. Raise your hand, no? One here.

Great. It's James Tate from Goldman Sachs. I guess 2 questions for your business. Firstly, it sounds like there's a lot of venue capacity coming online. So is the growth broadly in your regions or countries entirely volume driven? And if so, I guess, when do you think you can start being more aggressive on pricing and yield?

And then I guess, secondly, on the profitability of some of these events. Could you talk a bit about the relative margin of the shows in these faster-growing emerging countries? And do you believe you're at sort of trough margins now? Or do you require sort of incremental investment over the next few years to deliver the growth that you want?

Pete, do you want to...

I hope I won't say the wrong thing. So we actually have some of the strongest pricing in the world in this region, I believe it or not. I appreciate your question. And the expectation, obviously, is that maybe in some of our markets, we have low yields. We have very, very high yields because we're actually able to -- most of our products are positioned very much at the premium end of the market. And really, it's a feature of demand as well. There's very, very strong demand into our products.

So we've always priced quite aggressively. I mean by aggressively, I mean sort of an average price of maybe 6% per year up to higher single digits wouldn't be unusual. But from an industry average perspective, I know our selling prices across this region are probably at the very highest level compared to global pricing. And consequently, our margins are also very strong. So we're fast growing, but we're also 40% plus margin business across the whole of IMEA.

I mean, can I just ask maybe to because I think actually Turkey is quite interesting because it's different because obviously, as a market, it's got a lot of inflation. And in Turkey, I've -- I've never seen a market that's responded to price increases in terms of its inputs, in terms of its outputs. I mean it's just the culture there that actually you move pricing very quickly. Do you want to just talk about the culture of pricing in Turkey and how it moves very quickly?

I mean you have to be that way because when we look at our cost, we look at our sales prices, we look at them quarterly. So we identify if it's above a certain amount of inflation, then we adjust our prices. Otherwise, you cannot leave like that because inflation keeps on going on. So you have to adjust your pricing all the time.

Anybody you want to add anything? You want to keep away from pricing margins?

No, I think Informa is viewed as being premium in all of our markets. So I know in Turkey, the margins -- the pricing is different than it would be in Dubai. I'd say all across the GCC, our pricing is very at the high end. So Saudi, Dubai, Qatar, Kuwait, wherever we go in the GCC, the pricing is very high. But in Turkey, it will be lower, in India will be lower. But in those markets, we're premium compared to any other product. I'd say that with confidence actually.

And the more you give better products to them, you'll be able to increase more pricing. That's it.

Any other questions? Nick? -- then Steve?

Yes, Nick Dempsey from Barclays. So how far have you go in this region in terms of using Lead Insights that we were seeing in the demo over there and leveraging data in general to support growth of the shows? And I suppose as a follow-on, is there an opportunity to leverage that technology with DWTC when that deal closes?

Leveraging data is our business. I mean we -- I'd say our strongest asset in our business is our data. It helps us to drive our audiences. So that's not a new thing. We've been -- over the last 20 years, if you ask anyone in the exhibitions industry, what's your most important asset, they'll always say their data. And we use that data to drive the growth in our events naturally.

Lead Insights is -- has not been implemented in -- maybe in Chevron's part of the business, but not yet been implemented in the IMEA business. but that's going to start as of 1st of December. So we're starting to introduce Lead Insights products across the regions. It's currently not part of our mix.

Steve?

I just want to double check. It's probably a noddy question. But if the venue capacity goes up by 50% in the short term and then 100% on a year's view, just in terms of demand and supply, if all the events are wall bound and you're getting super high margins and pricing, does that mean that your yield and price comes under pressure and your margin comes under pressure? Yes, your volumes go up. What's the kind of puts and takes there?

Yes, I think so. Well, we've been through one cycle of this already with WHX because we've moved that to the new venue, and we've expanded very high double digits on that one addition, and our pricing has also gone up at the same time. So it hasn't affected us.

Is it -- any other questions? Well, I'd just like to thank the panel, big round of applause.

I just want to say -- and also a big thanks to Doug. I was reflecting as he was saying that our partnership in EMEA was the best thing since the acquisition of Tarsus. And Rich and I were comparing notes. When we did the deal with Tarsus, at the time, we were having a debate about what currency to use. And so for those of you who followed that deal, you may recall that we used a mixture of cash, equity and deferred equity.

But in order to make it add up, you had to believe that our deferred equity would be -- that our shares would trade at GBP 8.50. And I'd just like to put on record how prescient Doug was to know that our shares would go above GBP 8.50. And therefore, we were able to get the deal done, and he was the winner because there was a kicker if we got past GBP 8.50.

So the moral of the story is the beers are on Doug. Right. Thanks for that doing that, Doug. I think next up is Penny, Alex and Ashok. I think we need another chair on -- one standing, we don't. Okay. Over to you, Penny.

So thank you. So I'm Penny Ladkin-Brand, CEO of Taylor & Francis. I know lots of you flew in this morning. So if you do happen to fall asleep during the presentation, you can just write down now, growth. And then your colleagues will fill you in later on how we're going to do it. Because I've now been with the business for every year and so I'm super excited to share with you the plans that we're implementing.

So I spent my career in media, publishing and marketplace businesses, particularly those navigating a shift of market level change and using technology to drive -- to create strategic advantage. And that's exactly what attracted me to Taylor & Francis beyond the appeal of joining the Informa family. The opportunity to take a business with an exceptional market position, brands, invaluable content assets and over 200 years of heritage and evolve the business with a technology-led approach to unlock business advantage and growth.

So I'm joined today by 2 exceptional leaders, Alex, who brings over 17 years of Taylor & Francis expertise and he's going to share a bit about the market dynamics and how we're evolving our revenue mix and our go-to-market approach. We're also delighted to have Ashok with us. So Ashok brings extensive experience at the forefront of technology innovation. And he'll discuss how we're leveraging technology to evolve the business and unlock new opportunities.

So I think there has never been a more interesting and exciting time to be in the knowledge industry. The potential to combine human and machine intelligence provides us with the opportunity to have greater impact than ever before. So historically, Taylor & Francis has been a superb business, consistent performance, margin and cash generation. And in recent years, we've seen demand for trusted content significantly increasing the revenue growth rate from 1% to 2% to 3% to 4%.

Looking forward, our ambition is to accelerate the growth to 5%, building momentum from the positive dynamics and our plans to lean into those positive market dynamics. So our market is underpinned by 3 core drivers. The increasing supply of research, the increasing demand for research and validated content and the increasing value of trust. Today, our revenue mix is just over 60% journals and then 40% long-form content, which is principally books either distributed digitally to our B2B customers or also in print mainly through retail channels. So within the journals business, there are 2 different revenue streams, the pay-to-publish revenues where an article processing charge is paid for content to be published open access. That means that anyone in the world can read it for free. And then secondly, pay-to-read revenues.

The increasing volumes of research publication and high demand for open access content, combined with additional resources direct from funders are fueling the growth in the pay-to-publish revenues with a revenue growth trend of over 20%. Many of you know this industry super well. So -- but I know there are some who are newer to the business. So just to explain our reason for being. Our purpose is to advance society through knowledge created by the global academic community. This is a really powerful example of a research on a breakthrough drug published in one of our journals, Expert Opinion, which eventually leads to FDA approval and real-world cancer treatment application.

While this example comes from medical science, the impact is equally profound across the humanities and social sciences, where we share research on all sorts of topics from philosophy to education to psychology. These disciplines have an important impact on society, both on policy development as well as in applied settings. So the application of research knowledge in general to application is frustratingly slow. In a clinical setting, for example, it takes on average 17 years from research to real-world application but 17 years too slow.

As technology creates new possibilities, we believe we can help accelerate this cycle by sharing knowledge more effectively with those who wish to learn or apply research in real-world applications. Taylor & Francis is the leading publisher of humanities and social sciences research and academic content. But we also have a strong and burgeoning content portfolio in science, technology, engineering, maths, medical. We offer one of the broadest portfolios of all publishers with a significant number of interdisciplinary topics. As Ashok will cover shortly, in a more machine-driven world where connections between topics drive a greater innovation, this becomes a real strength for Taylor & Francis.

Knowledge creation is inherently global with subject discipline communities spanning the world. 10 years ago, the U.S. and Europe produced much of the volume of global academic research. That dynamic is changing and China is now the leading producer of research. And almost half of global research now originates from Asia Pacific and South Asia. Similarly, most of the global knowledge ecosystem today is in English language with important contributions to knowledge locked by language.

Following a similar journey to the B2B Events that we heard about just now, if we take content as the leading indicator for growth, there's a significant opportunity for revenue growth in growing markets. So you can see Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, which is how we parcel up our market opportunity is that little slice on the third box there. I think on the B2B Events equivalent, that was 21% of the revenue. And one of the benefits of being part of a large group such as Informa is the market access that affords where we can share infrastructure and relationships to unlock new geographies in a way that's much, much easier than if we were a stand-alone entity. So for example, we've just opened our own entity here in Dubai and are able to utilize the space in this office. One of my first real jobs was in a regional office of a multinational business. And I can tell you that our small regional office did not look like this.

To unlock this growth, we're looking at the knowledge ecosystem as a knowledge marketplace. So on the one side of the equation, we have the creators of knowledge who want to share their research with the consumers of knowledge to help advance research in that area. They also want to publish to support their career progression, to differentiate themselves and build reputation. On the other side of the equation, we have the consumers of knowledge who are looking to further their own research, learn or build products and services on the back of that research. Many of the participants on either side of the equation are the same person wearing a different hat. And this creates a really powerful flywheel effect as we increase value for one side, we generate network effects that benefit the entire ecosystem. So this allows us a simple equation for how we power the business, increase the share of trusted knowledge in target segments, increase the consumption of knowledge and then focus on the needs of the customers. For example, it's increasingly easy to create new knowledge.

There's no shortage of demand to publish with us, no shortage of demand. Capacity and it was really interesting just hearing about the venue constraints there from the team at IMEA. So capacity and our ability to handle the increasing volumes has been our constraint. Intelligent technology changes all of this. With our editorial process, we have an increasingly sophisticated mix of human and technology-based checks to validate that the research is real and that the author is who they say they are. This is increasingly where scale and technology matter.

So those of you who attended some of the product demos earlier will have seen some of the new capabilities that we've already created to use technology to allow us to scale effectively and drive growth. To ensure that our focus is truly geared to delivering what our customers need then, we've created a new customer-centric operating model, focusing on 3 different customer segments.

So firstly, the Academic & Government segment, very much the heartland. Here, we work with librarians, faculty, the research office, government agencies and also directly with founders -- funders such as the Gates Foundation. We see continued opportunity in this segment, both from providing existing customers with access to more content and more publishing as well as reaching new customers. Over the past 3 months, for example, we've been piloting a new commercial approach of blended models, packages tailored to customer needs to ensure that customers are rewarded with more value for increasing levels of spend and partnership with us. We've also been benefiting from investment in Elysia. I was in Melbourne just the other week, talking to the team there about their approaches to new customer segments. And they were sharing how they're using Elysia to provide personalization at scale, providing them with more capacity.

The second segment is our professional audience, where we're focusing on creating more digital content offerings to help those customers advance their understanding and their career. The third segment, which is new for us, is where we have a new focus on the corporate sector. This is a huge market. Historically, we've had a number of relationships, which have just sprung up from organic demand where without having a particularly tailored content offering or service offering.

As businesses of all scales, all types and sizes look to leverage AI to develop their own business, high-quality trusted content is critical. So over the last year, we've identified these opportunities just by looking at the data. As we shift from being a digital business to an intelligent business, we have the opportunity to do so much more with what we have, creating greater organizational agility by having easier, faster access to the answers and creating better experiences for our customers and accelerating our revenue growth.

Let me now hand over to Alex, who's going to provide a bit more color on the market dynamics and the plans that we have in place. Thank you.

Thank you, Penny and hello. I'm Alex Robinson. I am the Chief Commercial Officer at Taylor & Francis and also the Managing Director of the Academic & Government division. I've been with the business for 17 years, working in roles across marketing and sales. And during that time, I've had the pleasure of working with universities, consortia and authors in every part of the world.

I genuinely enjoy supporting our customers with the complex problems that they try and solve as they research and disseminate powerful ideas that ultimately benefit the world. As Penny outlined, there are 3 factors that are key growth drivers for our business, the increasing supply of research, the increasing demand for research and the increasing value of trust. You can see the sustained increase in supply and demand for research on this slide. More research articles are being produced, supported by more research dollars and being read by a growing body of ever more researchers.

This is the flywheel Penny mentioned in action, more knowledge being created and consumed in a virtuous circle, where our role is to validate, curate and disseminate that research. This flywheel is driven by investment into higher education and into corporate research and development globally as countries look to enhance or develop these activities. On a more fundamental level, it's driven by the fact that as we learn more, we find more to learn. As a strongly interdisciplinary publisher with strengths in both STEM and humanities and social science subject areas, we are particularly well placed to capitalize on the way in which topics originate in one discipline and then generate waves of further research across disciplinary boundaries, which a strongly interdisciplinary publisher is better placed to capture.

It's worth noting that the growth in research article numbers that you're seeing on this slide is mainly before the positive impact AI has had in significantly boosting researcher productivity, which is a trend we are now seeing in action. Thinking about the increasing value of trust, we've now had nearly 3 years of generative AI, changing, among other things, how students, researchers and publishers behave. No one has a crystal ball on the full impact of AI but based on the early steps we've taken in securing partnerships with technology companies in this space, our conviction is that the demand for verified information is going to go up in a world where the cost of creating plausible but incorrect information drops to zero.

The sophisticated work that we undertake as publishers to coordinate peer review, ensure content is validated through multiple levels of human and technology-assisted checks and to preserve the scholarly record in the face of increasing levels of disinformation will only become more valuable in the future. And I think many of you saw the demonstrations earlier today that give you an idea of how we're planning to deal with and manage those trends.

I'm now going to cover 4 critical activities in detail. So forgive me, I will take a little bit of time on this slide. These activities accelerate our growth rate overall. Growth in Open Access is accelerating due to a combination of growth in the volume of high-quality research our customers want to publish and from the range of commercial models that support it. We have benefited from attention and funding from additional partners, including from the research office within universities, directly from government, philanthropic and corporate funders of research.

We also benefit again here as an interdisciplinary publisher with scale both in STEM subject areas where open access has been a key feature for much longer and in the humanities and social sciences, where we play a leading role in helping to unlock the transition to open access through our long-term read and publish partnerships with universities. Our approach to developing sustainable models for supporting open access in books and to supporting open research more generally through our F1000 brand and partnerships also helps us to provide a comprehensive, distinctive and innovative service in this area.

All of the revenue growth driven by these approaches is only feasible because of the constant vigilance we undertake to ensure that this growth in research does not come at a cost in the quality of that research, as you were seeing earlier in the demonstrations. Growth in the usage and impact of our content is accelerating thanks to technology, which is helping customers to discover, purchase and use a greater range of our content more easily.

New ways of discovering and engaging with academic content like LLMs will make the research we publish more discoverable, more usable and more valuable to both current and new audiences, especially when they need to engage with those complex ideas in detail as my colleague, Ashok, will cover later in this presentation. We've already seen strong increases in the discoverability of our content driven by AI. ChatGPT is already our third biggest traffic source, growing rapidly and driving up overall traffic on our platforms. We see the resulting traffic is as high quality as traffic from more traditional sources. And it appears to us that customers are finding our content more effectively and wanting to engage with the original source material rather than just a truncated summary. And we strongly believe that AI will help us drive up the impact of that content, ensuring that users are able to apply the content they find much more effectively to the problems and opportunities they face.

Growth from our existing customers is accelerating as we package more and more of our content and services together for them across our broad portfolio. This makes it easier and simpler for us to convert the technology-driven increases in usage into customer spend as we provide customers with more flexible packages that enable them to use their budgets to greatest effect. We refer to these packages internally as blended models, as Penny mentioned earlier. Again, the breadth of our interdisciplinary portfolio supports this approach with our content mix across STEM and humanities and social sciences and across both journal articles and long-form research, enabling us to provide tailored mixes of content and publishing services to a wide spectrum of customer types.

At its heart, these packages ensure that our customers prioritize spending money with Taylor & Francis because it represents great value across a wide range of products and services and comes with the flexibility to adapt to evolving needs. Lastly, growth from new geographies is accelerating as we target underpenetrated geographies and corporate customers, too, much more effectively. Many countries are scaling up their ambitions and funding for higher education but have traditionally faced barriers around funding and accessibility. With more flexible commercial models, helping funding to go further and as technology helps make English language content more accessible, we see strong growth in territories beyond our traditional core continuing to drive overall performance. The Middle East, Latin America and ASEAN are sources of strong demand for new deals and expanded partnerships as we work with universities, consortia and funders with the ambition to create and sustain world-class higher education sectors.

Our activities with new corporate customers also represent a tremendous opportunity for new customer growth for our business as they look to drive AI-assisted research and development, for example, in the pharmaceutical industry and as corporate learning changes and becomes more responsive and adaptive, again, driven by AI tools. Earlier this year, I was excited to expand what had formally been a small corporate go-to-market team and to bring in expertise from other businesses. This will kickstart our acceleration of the revenues we generate in this area from a relatively small base and especially as our portfolio of STEM content grows.

Alongside this, we see further demand from the technology companies building LLMs for trusted content to act as an anchor and benchmark for model training. Partnerships with these companies can drive usage of our source content, supply royalties to authors and align with our broader goal of fostering human progress through knowledge. Our partnerships in this area are carefully crafted to ensure we protect intellectual property rights, including limits on verbatim text extracts and alignment on the importance of detailed citation references. A final motivation and benefit for Taylor & Francis in looking to strike these careful partnerships is that through our work in this area, we gain insight into the trends and dynamics that will shape the discoverability and usage of research for years to come, leaving us well positioned for future changes in this area.

I've covered 4 clear reasons why our growth is accelerating. And for all of them, technology is the key enabler, ensuring that we can scale effectively and that we can connect our content to the evolving use cases our customers have for it, as my colleague, Ashok, will now cover. Thank you.

Thank you, Alex and hello, everyone. I'm Ashok Subramanian, Chief Technology Officer for Taylor & Francis. I've spent over 2 decades in various industries: retail, financial services, health care, pharma and academic publishing, helping organizations adopt new technology paradigms and emerge stronger. The AI revolution presents the opportunity to transform research, knowledge creation and consumption and the opportunity to be part of shaping the future at Taylor & Francis was one I could not miss.

Alex spoke about the market dynamics and trends that we are seeing, increasing supply, increasing demand and increasing value of trust. I want to share how our technology infrastructure and data capabilities are the foundations that enable us to seize the opportunity provided by these 3 trends and positions us to thrive in an increasingly AI-driven world. We are building Taylor & Francis on fully digital and intelligent workflows that span the entire research life cycle, from authoring and peer review through to discovery and access. The enhancements we are deploying are projected to save over 50,000 hours of human effort every year based on efficiency improvements across the volume of submissions we supported in 2024. This is real operational leverage already embedded in our workflows. And it is not just about digitizing existing processes. It's about reimagining how research gets created, validated and consumed.

This end-to-end holistic approach is key to compressing the research to application time line that Penny mentioned. The marginal cost of creating content may be approaching zero but the challenge of maintaining quality standards necessary for research to have impact is becoming exponentially higher. This gap is precisely what we bridge through our technology infrastructure. Our content isn't just text on a page. It's structured, enriched data that can be consumed by both humans and machines. We are investing in ensuring our content is available in formats that enable effective machine consumption, which is crucial as research discovery increasingly happens through AI platforms.

This structured approach means when ChatGPT or other AI systems reference our content, they are accessing verified contextualized research with proper attribution, driving the high-quality traffic Alex described back to our platforms. Data enhances everything we do. We are developing our systems to support content enrichment that automatically identifies relevant cross-disciplinary connections, intelligent recommendations engines that surface relevant research across fields, advanced classification systems that help researchers discover work at the intersection of disciplines and decision support tools that assist our editorial teams in maintaining the quality standards necessary for research integrity. This is particularly powerful for interdisciplinary research.

As Penny mentioned, one of our great advantages we have over other publishers is our broad content portfolio across disciplines from humanities and social sciences right through to science, technology, engineering, mathematics and medicine. And we use this to our technological advantage. We are seeing that foundational breakthroughs increasingly happens at the intersection of disciplines. For example, establishing trustworthy AI in patient care requires insights from computer science, clinical medicine, philosophy and ethics. This interdisciplinary intelligence is particularly valuable as AI systems themselves become much more sophisticated. They need comprehensive connected knowledge bases, not siloed content. We are building systems to identify and highlight these cross-disciplinary opportunities for today's and tomorrow's researchers.

Our technology serves everyone from expert researchers to corporates seeking competitive advantage. The same content foundations, properly modeled and mapped enables us to create tailored experiences for domain experts seeking cutting-edge research, professionals sharpening their skills and corporate R&D teams, leveraging our insights to drive innovation. Our technology also enables us to serve our users worldwide while maintaining local relevance. Our systems can adapt content presentation for different markets, languages, cultures, supporting the global audiences that Alex outlined. We are deploying AI not just in our products but in how we build the systems themselves. This dual approach allows our technology experts to focus on solving problems rather than just writing code, amplifying that impact significantly. And we are already seeing 30% efficiency gains in our internal product teams as they use AI to accelerate development. This means we deliver new features and platforms faster at lower cost and with significantly more impact per engineer.

This approach is enabling us to rapidly streamline our authoring processes with AI-assisted metadata enhancements, peer review workflows that help maintain quality while scaling volume and discovery mechanisms that help researchers find relevant work more efficiently. These enhancements are delivering tangible results in reducing publication times, improving discoverability, while maintaining the rigorous quality standards our research communities expect. In an age where AI can create compelling but potentially inaccurate content, our role as guardians of research integrity becomes even more critical. We have developed an ethical and responsible innovation framework that ensures quality, transparency and trust.

Some of you might have seen a demo of this in the products that we are building and how we are using this framework. Our framework ensures we amplify human capability rather than replacing human judgment. We don't slap AI onto everything. Every AI implementation is intentional, carefully designed to solve specific problems while maintaining the core intent of the underlying research. This is particularly crucial when we create different expressions of research content. We ensure we never change the fundamental meaning. Even a minimal error rate can have massive implications in research. This is why our approach emphasizes precision and verification at every step. We are working closely with academic and technology communities, including the LLM players to embed new capabilities responsibly.

These partnerships allow us to stay at the forefront of technological advancement while ensuring our innovations serve the genuine needs of the research community. Our technology infrastructure enables us to support the growing volume of research while maintaining quality standards. We are not just keeping pace with growth. We are enabling it through more efficient, intelligent systems.

So to summarize, our technology transforms increasing research volumes into increasing value for all stakeholders. Authors reach broader audiences, researchers discover insights faster, institutions maximize their investments and society benefits from accelerated innovation. The technology and data foundations we are building aren't just operational enhancements. They create structural advantages. As I said earlier, 50,000 hours a year in productivity gains already captured, 30% efficiency uplift in product development and faster publication through intelligent transformation workflows. These aren't future promises. They are live capabilities. We scale with volume, creating operating leverage, competitive differentiation and new paths to monetization. This is how Taylor & Francis thrives in the age of intelligence and we're doing it with the sophistication and stewardship that our research communities expect and deserve.

I'll hand over to Penny to wrap up. Thank you.

Thanks, Ashok. So I'm just going to put this slide back up because really that's the key takeaway from today's presentation, the positive market dynamics, no shortage of demand and our plans to lean into that demand, as you've heard from the team today. So we've got good revenue momentum and we're confident of achieving our ambition. So I think we've got about 10 minutes for questions. So feel free to ask us any questions. Any tricky ones, we'll just pass straight to Stephen.

It's [ John Davis ] here from Bloomberg Intelligence. You said an awful lot about the revenue prospects. Can you give like 2 words on costs [indiscernible]?

So we think that the margin is healthy and no planned sort of change in either direction.

Will Larwood from Berenberg. Maybe just the ambition to hit 5% growth, should we interpret that by the end of this 2028 period? The first question. And then secondly, as you're able to sort of put through a lot more volume, not just you but also competitors, how are you likely to see pricing evolve within the market going forward?

Yes. So I've forgotten the first question already.

5% growth if it's going to reach in 2028.

Yes. So I think that wouldn't be an unreasonable assumption within the plan period is -- so not tomorrow but not in 10 years' time. And then in terms of volume and pricing, I mean, we've certainly seen healthy pricing expansion over the previous year. I think -- I mean, we talked a lot about volume because that's really where intelligent technology plays a significant part in increasing the capacity. I think value is obviously critical. And so being a leading publisher in topics makes a big difference. And so making sure that we've got a really healthy portfolio is also important and that's what gives us some of the pricing expansion that we've been able to capitalize on.

It's George Webb, Morgan Stanley. Just to double-click on the growth ambition and to come back to some of the numbers earlier, I guess the 2025-2028 plan technically says 3% to 4% for academic markets. So there's a world in which the next few years could potentially be 3%. What needs to happen to get to 5% versus 3% over the next 3 years? Why could it potentially only be 3% from your perspective?

So I think there's -- we've talked about our plans here. So there's an awful lot of demand as we've touched on and we're really confident in sort of how we start to absorb that demand and expand into the new markets. We need to deliver on that expectation. So we're really confident about what we're doing. But whether Gareth wants to bank that into the model today, I think, is a question more for the team.

It's Nick Dempsey from Barclays. So if you look at Springer Nature's journal numbers in the last couple of years, they've been really boosted up by the fact that a lot of submissions have come into them instead of Hindawi, instead of Wiley, instead of all the other less trusted journal players. I worry a little bit that, that will normalize a bit over time and that will prove a headwind going in the opposite direction to all of the good growth drivers you've been talking about for the next few years. So why should I not worry?

Alex, I don't know whether you want to take this one.

[indiscernible] going on in the business to make sure we can sift and sort that underlying growth in high-quality research from the bad actors that there are out there producing fraudulent research. And that set of processes, human and technological, we think we've got right. We think we're able to kind of continue evolving them so they can cope with ever more scale. And I think that gives us an advantage, the work we've done in that area. I think it's always a risk that there is bad content out there in the world but it's a challenge we've been dealing with for a number of years already. So I think it's something that we have good practical experience of that we're now leveraging technology to manage even more effectively.

If I can just follow up. My point was slightly different in that I was saying that because there have been a number of players that have been sort of tainted by what you just described there, they have taken fewer submissions, this is what Springer Nature tells us. Meanwhile, the great trusted brands like yourselves and Springer Nature have taken more, does that not balance -- rebalance a little bit over time and prove a headwind to those who have benefited just recently, i.e., the trusted brands?

I mean I think if you're sort of asking, are we seeing an uptick in submissions right now because submissions have flowed away from Springer and Hindawi and others. I think actually, we haven't seen too much of that. I think we're seeing in geography, in discipline, in subject area, some of that natural underlying growth in research. And our portfolio makeup is kind of fairly different from Springer if you look at the balance of subject areas that we talked about quite a bit there. So I'm not too worried about that. And I think the processes that we have in place are keeping me asleep at night as it were about those challenges.

Go ahead, Steve.

Just on the 5%, thinking that through, the one-off deals that we've had in terms of AI and stuff like that, in theory, are you able to sort of translate any of those into longer-term recurring type deals? And if that is so, is that in your 5%, or will that be more than the 5%?

I think -- so we talked to -- I talked a bit earlier about the corporate sector. And I think that's the market that we're really excited by where the -- what was the sort of big one-off deals become much more recurring revenue deals where it's really embedded within the kind of the product of the business. So initially, that's very much in the pharma space but we're increasingly seeing sort of everyone invest in AI and research and content is critical to that. So that's where we're seeing the market expansion.

So that's more than the 5% or in the 5%?

Let's say that's within the 5%. So yes, because that's -- for us, that's a small segment but a big market opportunity.

Okay. Thank you very much.

Okay. We're in the short strokes now. So -- that's what we promised and that's what we're going to do with the money. Anyone got any questions? All right. Final questions and then we're going to wrap up on the live stream. And then there's some housekeeping for those who are here in Dubai.

My question is, if I look at other quality media businesses that have compounding growth, one of the things they do is buybacks consistently. You've been doing them for a few years. Why are they not part of your strategy officially?

I think they are here.

Compounding capital returns enables us to continue with progressive dividends and share buybacks whilst deleveraging further and continue to reinvest for further growth as the market consolidates.

So can we go to the next question then. So what type of size are we talking for the buyback going forward consistently?

I think we're not today but it's a fair question. I mean we -- as you say, we -- when we came back from COVID, we reset the dividend. We brought buybacks into our shareholder return program. We actually had quite an open dialogue with a good number of shareholders, some of whom are in the room, some -- many of whom are on the live stream as to whether or not we should do a special dividend or introduce buybacks. The overwhelming feedback we got was to do buybacks rather than a special dividend. And since then, we've had buybacks as part of the mix. What we're saying here is, we think the cash flow generation allows us to do that. But I think as to what number on a per year basis over 3 years, I don't think today is the day to do that. But is part of the mix? Definitely part of the mix on a going-forward basis.

Maybe above 2% of market cap.

Is that a recommendation or a...

A question.

Or an opening bid?

So a bit of a geeky analyst question. The 30% adjusted operating profit margin to be achieved sort of in the end of the 2025 to '28 period. Are we saying that the average 2028 adjusted operating profit margin will be 30%? Or coming out of 2028, we'll be rolling into a 30%? It matters because of the biennial up and downs. Or are we saying that if we smooth out the biennials, the '28 would look about 30%?

Fortunately, you're very near Gareth. So if you could hand in the microphone, I think he will tell you that the answer is 1 of those 3 but with a variation. Gareth, over to you.

Yes, I think -- you're right, biannual up year, down year effect is a important dynamic in that. What we've been saying is, the 30% is in 2029, so coming out of it rather than the biannual down year in 2028. If we can get there sooner clearly but that's the target we're aiming for is 2029 full year reported margin.

Why don't you grab a comfy seat on the stage because I'm sure there'll be even more. What did you call it, Nick? Geeky analyst questions. Next question?

Yes. James Tate from Goldman. So I've got 2 questions, please. I guess, firstly, Stephen, could you just talk about how you view the Informa's current portfolio of assets? I guess today, the vast majority of the group is now B2B markets as well as being the fastest growing. So I guess the question is, do you see yourselves as the best owner of Taylor & Francis over the plan period and beyond? And secondly, on capital allocation, you reiterated your target leverage range of 1.5 to 2.5x, still quite a wide range. And where do you want to get to by the end of the plan period in 2028? Is sort of 2x still a fair base case? Or do you want to get to the bottom end?

Do you want to take the second one first?

Yes. I mean it is a wide range intentionally and then we want to maintain some optionality about where we fall in that range. We currently -- we're at the top end of it. As you know, we'll finish this year within the range of having come back down after the essential combination. But from there, we want to maintain optionality. So to the question -- 2 questions ago about what number might you look at for share buybacks.

Again, it's around optionality, what other options for capital allocation are there to M&A and combinations versus what opportunity is there for buybacks versus what you want to happen to the leverage each year. And I think the strong recommendation of the Board is to maintain some optionality on that. Management would agree with that. So I would say we would trend down to the middle of the range over time on the leverage. But would maintain optionality in each year to think about where we are, what acquisition opportunities could be coming to market and how we could best deploy capital to create value.

On your first question, James, I mean, I don't know whether we're the best owner but I would say that -- history would say we've been a very good owner and we are a very good owner of that business. But you may have heard me say before, others in the room and on the live stream definitely has, we're not an owner of the business, we're an operator of the business, which is why -- I mean, if you take the time track that we've been discussing from the beginning to the end of the day, the Taylor & Francis business is, I think, 2.2x the size of what it was in 2013.

Now this is not a business that has not grown. It's materially different in its revenue mix. To the questions that, I think it was Nick, he was asking about Hindawi and some of the practices that have gone on in some parts of the research market, we have managed to come into that open market. We actually looked at the Hindawi business and decided not to acquire it. We decided we would do it a different way. We've built a very significant position in the open business. If I look at the major players in that market over the period and I've got to know them all, I think if you rack and stack us up against the 6 or 7 other major players in that market, we've had a very, very consistent performance over 12 years. So I think on any objective measure, we're good operators of this business.

As it relates to the portfolio, the balance in the portfolio, I think, is about right. We wanted to be a higher growth business than -- certainly sitting in 2013 or 2014, I could never see a way of getting the academic business to be an 8%, 9% growth business. But I thought in B2B, there was a market that we could take, largely because the biggest player in the market at the time didn't seem to me to look like it was going to be putting any more capital to work in that market.

So therefore, if RELX or Reed as they then were, weren't going to put capital to work, really our opportunity was, could we be better than UBM? Could we be better than? Could we be better than? Could we be better than? Or indeed, could we buy them? And that seemed like a more sensible allocation of capital to drive a high-growth business. But the balance of the portfolio, I think, is very rewarding for shareholders. If we were a poor operator of the business, I think the question would have more bite. Beyond that, I think it's just a neatness question or a shareholder return question, which slightly goes to your first, which is, if we weren't the owner of this business, what would we do with the capital? Or do we need the capital in order to drive the growth that we are offering shareholders over the period? And we don't. So the question comes back to, are we a good owner and will we continue to be a good owner-operator of the business? And I think what Penny and Ashok and Alex have laid out gives you some real texture as to how we will do that.

It's Lara Simpson from JPMorgan. I just want to come back to the Lead Insights and apologies if I missed this. But can you just give us an indication of how many or what proportion of your B2B Events customers are currently using it? And how exactly you are monetizing it, so just the incremental revenues coming from that stream? And then my second question is, also just to come back to the margin improvement and that 30% guide. I know we've got the biannual effects coming through but can you just talk to some of the specific operational improvements that you are implementing to drive that margin improvement? And beyond the biannual, just how we should think about the cadence of that delivery?

I'll give you some time to think about your answer on that. I might bring Andy in on this because Lead Insights originated from his business. Did you go to the product demonstration?

Yes, I did. And I think I saw 160% revenue growth, which is obviously phenomenal but just trying to understand the base.

You want to know what the base number is?

Well, just roughly any monetization.

Are you sneaking a geeky analyst-like question in there?

I'm trying my best.

Andy, go for it. I think you need a mic.

I think the answer for '26 is 160 of the 1,000 events. Is it -- Lucy is over there. Is that right? 160 events in...

[indiscernible]

200.

200. So I have 500 events. I would think I want 350 to 400 of them at least. But can't speak for Patrick. How many of your events would you want to have Lead Insights?

Two.

Two?

We've got 450 events, something like that, so more than 50%. Sorry, just one point for that. For us, it's more the number of exhibitors than it is events. For Andy's business I guess more conference events than exhibitors.

Yes, I think. So we've got a long way to go. A lot of upside, I think, is what you want to know.

Yes. We think it's a very powerful product for a number of reasons. I mean the product came out of Andy's business -- oops, Lucy, who's at the back of the room, was one of the [indiscernible] of the project. What we've begun to do is to roll it out in all those places. We think it has multiple benefits. I mean; a, it's a good product; b, it's -- there's a proprietary element to the data and the product; c, it's a source of incremental revenue; and d, it's a way of bundling. And all of those things are useful for stickiness. So there's a lot of value in there beyond the simple, what price do you charge for it.

Oh sorry, on the margin. I was trying to get you off that hook.

Well, in that case. Yes, the margin expansion is really a factor of the revenue growth, consistent revenue growth, 5% plus, 6% plus in B2B Events and how that drops through in terms of operating leverage. We're a business that consistently delivers underlying operating profit growth ahead of the underlying revenue growth. And as B2B event scales, you've got some of the specific benefits coming out of One Informa through things like Lead Insights as well. That drop-through of the underlying operating profit growth through to margin is what helps the expansion. So you will see a progressive expansion over time. But if you look at our margin, it tends to go up more strongly in a biennial up year and be close to flat in a biennial down year year-on-year. And that's why you will see the target get hit in 2029 rather than 2028.

It's Ciaran Donnelly from Citi. Two for myself.

In terms of -- I think the comments around London have been, I'd say, fairly scathing in terms of your view on some of the direction it's gone. But I guess if we could talk about maybe thoughts around listing venue, obviously, you alluded to the fact that U.K. is a very small proportion of the business now. Just your updated thoughts on what the Board and yourself think about listing venue.

And secondly, I think from the math of the addressable market, you kind of laid out in current revenue what you kind of low 30s market share in terms of what you probably deem addressable. And I guess in the context of M&A, one, could you just give us kind of thoughts around would there be a scenario where actually an event space could be a potential target or event space owner, I should say? And two, I mean, should we think in the context of, is there a limit to where being a scale player, the marginal benefit of that scale actually reduced over time, i.e., in a scenario where you and Reed ever got together, would the math actually be as attractive as hypothetically it could be?

Great questions. Let me try and take maybe in reverse order. I don't think if I look at what I think is likely to be ahead of us and that we're likely to be interested in, in the area that you're probing in the period of the plan, we wouldn't do anything if we didn't think we could see it would be additive to the scale benefits that we've got, either because it was compounding our strength in a sector or it was expanding our footprint in a geography that we were already in, which gave us a higher quality of commercial exchange, either with a venue owner or a venue operator or a city government or a state government or because it took us -- it was a beachhead into a geography that we're not already in and it was a way of getting capacity in a market or capability in a submarket.

So no, I mean, if I look at the 7 or 8 or 9 assets that could come to market in the next 3 or 4 years, I think we'd be pretty forensic about which would work and I think they would be additive. I don't think we'd be seduced by scale for its own sake. I'm not suggesting that's what you're suggesting in your question. Maybe 8, 9, 10 years ago, we might have but I don't think so now, no. So I think one of the things we're trying to communicate is, we think there's real runway in this market for us. There's real runway organically. There's a real runway in geo development. There's a real runway in brand extension. There's real runway in other services. And there might be some targeted additions but we'll be very, very disciplined about where we do that.

On would we ever see ourselves going into buying a venue owner? I mean, you never say never because you say never and the next day you do it. And then I've got to say, well, when I said no, what I really meant was yes, maybe. But strategically, no, we've looked at that. The only time we've ever really considered it materially is as a route into opening up a geography. There were 2 countries where I did have quite detailed conversations about being an anchor investor in the development of a venue in return for profile protection or profile allocations over a period of time. But it was relatively de minimis capital. I mean I'm never casual about any capital expenditure but it was relatively de minimis capital. It was seed corn capital.

And really, it was a way of sealing a partnership. Beyond that, we're not a real estate business. We just don't want to get into that sort of capital exposure on our balance sheet. So I wouldn't [indiscernible] about that. On your first comment, I hope I've never been scathing about London. I mean I think London is one of the great cities of the world. I've lived half my life in London. It is -- 82% of the U.K. economy is services. As you all have picked up in the discussions today, the adopted children of the manufacturing industry and the supply chain associated with our trade shows. It doesn't mean that you can't make scale shows out of servicing the service industry but really, you're much more orientated towards manufacturing markets.

That's why if you look at the top 10 venues in the world by size, 4 of them are in Germany, it is because it's a giant manufacturing economy. That's why there's big -- that's why there's big venue capacity in China. There's big venue capacity in North America. The genius of what they've done here is they've worked out -- it's a hub point. It's still also -- they are a manufacturing center for many things but not in the same way. But it's a hub point. London is still a hub point more for service industries rather than for manufacturing industries.

We're a big customer of [indiscernible], which is, in fact, owned by the UAE down the road. And we have a relationship. I think we're a big -- I was going to say, I don't know whether we're the biggest but we're a big customer of [indiscernible]. So we do business in the United Kingdom. But relatively, it's never going to be one of our scale markets for those reasons. As to listing, I mean, the Chairman is in the back. So you can -- if you want to grab him afterwards, he can give you his own view. I know he'll do that because he often gives me his own view. I mean, rightly, the Board reviews it as you would expect it to, on a regular basis, not necessarily annually to see whether or not we are accessing capital markets in the most efficient and competitive way.

For now, we're very comfortable with our listing in London and it has served us well over the period. Look, I'm the Chief Executive of the company. Do I think we're undervalued? Sure. How many chief executives of companies think their businesses are undervalued? Probably most. Do I lay that at the foot of the London market? No, most of the time, I lay it at the foot of Richard's door. And part of what we're trying to do here is get the market to understand the deep embedded structural value in our business that we've built over the period and where we see we can bring that to life over the next 3 to 4 years. I think if we keep knocking that out of the park quarter-on-quarter for the next 3 or 4 years, I have a high degree of confidence we can drive value into our equity wherever it's listed.

Who wants to ask the and finally question then?

Phew. Nobody does.

Okay. I think we'll cut the live stream. Thank you very much for colleagues who are on it for staying with us. I hope the transmission quality has been good and I hope you've picked up the thread of what's going on. But I'm afraid the rest of the evening is now ours. So it's good night from them and it's good night from me.