News
T
he Hyve Group made their second
major acquisition since Mark
Shashoua took the reins. After the
acquisition of Ascential Exhibitions for
£300m in 2018 they have splashed out
$145m on Shoptalk and Groceryshop
- two leading conferences in the retail
and grocery sectors. It’s a young
business (Shoptalk was launched in 2015
followed by Groceryshop in 2018) but
one that has already reached $12.2m
EBITA in 2019, meaning that Hyve has
paid a historic multiple of just under
12x. The co-founders Anil Aggarwal and
Simran Aggarwal launched Money 2020
and sold it to i2i Events (now Ascential)
in 2014 when Shashoua was CEO there.
Comexposium has announced
the intention to acquire France-
based Europa Group – organiser of
50 healthcare congresses, including
Cardiovascular and Opthalmology
events. With their previous acquisition
of IMCAS (Ageing Science) in June
2018, healthcare is now one of their
major sectors.
CREtech, the US real estate tech and
conference company, which is owned by
The News Funnel, has acquired London
property technology event FUTURE
PropTech. It started 5 years ago as a
Meet Up with 60 people and has grown
to 1,800 attendees in 2019.
Terrapinn, organiser of Roads
and Traffic Expo in Australia, the
Philippines, Thailand and North Africa,
has acquired UK-based Essential
Infrastructure Events (EIE), organiser
of Highways UK. EIE was founded by
Andrew Dowding with backing from
the Quartz Business Media team (Keith
Harris and Paul Michael) who are
creating an initiative in 2020 to support
entrepreneurs looking to launch their
own events.
The Dealmaker
Steve Monnington of
Mayfield Media Strategies
reviews the deals of 2019
These deals brought the total number
of transactions in 2019 to 82, just five
shy of 2018’s record of 87 transactions
and 51 different purchasers. It’s clear
that the last two years have marked
a step change in M&A activity with
significantly more buyers than in
previous years.
In my review of 2018, I noted that
the type of buyer has changed, with
Reed and Informa/UBM slowing down
their activity. In 2015, they acquired 25
businesses, which represented 36% of
total transactions. In 2018, this dropped
to 11 (13.5%) and in 2019 decreased
further to 7 (8.5%), mostly by Reed.
Private Equity (PE) owned organisers,
primarily Clarion, CloserStill Media,
Comexposium and Emerald (still 65%
owned by Onex despite being publicly
quoted) were joined in 2019 by Tarsus
and accounted for 18 transactions (22%)
between them.
“One trend that I wasn’t expecting was the number of
early-stage companies attempting to take advantage of
a buoyant M&A market by trying to sell too early, often
without proof of concept or market...”
08 — February
The geographic balance of
acquisitions of UK and US companies,
compared with the dominance of
emerging markets five years ago,
has continued to climb, with 44
transactions, i.e. 53.6%, in 2019,
compared to 24 (32%) in 2014.
In 2018, I made some predictions for
2019 and I’m pleased to say that some of
these came true.
I have written a lot about the growing
importance of PE in the sector and I
predicted that there would be new PE
participation in 2019. At the end of 2018,
we saw Charterhouse sell their stake in
Comexposium to Credit Agricole and
Inflexion sell their stake in CloserStill
Media to Providence Equity. We also
saw Phoenix Equity, previous owners
of CloserStill, back Nineteen Events as
their new exhibition adventure. These
were all re-investments by the usual
PE suspects and this continued in
2019 when Tarsus de-listed as a public
company and sold to Charterhouse.
However, 2019 saw new PE players
enter.
• Apiary Capital backed Duncan Kirk
and his team, primarily taken from
Clarion, under the name of Roar
Techmedia, who acquired a bunch of
shows from Prsym.
• Graphite Capital acquired conference
organiser Hanson Wade.
• EMZ partners acquired FCDE’s stake
in Weyou (formerly Tarsus France)
There were some PE exits as well to
re-dress part of the balance with LDC
selling FC Business Intelligence to
Reuters despite owning it for less than
a year and Immediate Media acquiring
Upper Street Events from Livingbridge.
I also predicted the continuing
non-core disposals from the large
organisers and we saw this with several
transactions. Clarion sold to Endeavour
Business Media more than 20 media
brands and related events that came
with their acquisition of Pennwell and
also sold their German manufacturing
exhibitions to EasyFairs. Informa sold
several of the UBM Life Science Media
brands to MJH Associates, as well