Dealmakers

Steve Monnington Managing Director Mayfield Media Strategies

s we start a new year , it is worth a look back on 2020 . Normally my mergers and acquisitions ( M & A ) review of the past year is logical , sometimes predictable and follows the trends from previous years , but Covid has changed all of that . When lockdown came , all acquisition transactions that were in process were put on hold and , 10 months later , many remain on hold and will be so until it ’ s clear that there is a reliable opening date for exhibitions .

As a result of this , the number of transactions in 2020 was significantly down from the usual 70 to 80 , to a record low in the last 20 years of just 38 .

Deals and Buyers last 4 years

100 90 80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0

Above : Deals

2017 2018 2019 2020

Buyers

It may be surprising that , in lockdown , there were still more than 20 acquisitions , but in the main these were either Covid-related transactions involving association owned shows with cash flow issues and small private organisers with their businesses under threat , or businesses that have successfully created digital revenues .

There were three notable digital related transactions in the last couple of months of 2020 . In my last column I reported on Clarion ’ s acquisition of Quartz Events and the acquisition of Masters of Pediatric Dermatology by Tarsus , both great examples of deals that only happened because of the successful pivot from physical to digital .

The acquisition of pure digital businesses as a complement to physical events is likely to become the norm and a great example of this is Hyve ’ s acquisition of Retail Meetup , almost exactly a year from when they acquired physical events , Shoptalk and Groceryshop from the same founders – Anil Aggarwal and Simran Rekhi Aggarwal .

Retail Meetup becomes Hyve ’ s flagship digital format and four events are planned for 2021 - Groceryshop Spring Meetup , Shoptalk Meetup for Women , Shoptalk Europe Meetup and Shoptalk Fall Meetup . All are planned at times of the year to be complementary to the in-person Shoptalk and Groceryshop events .

Looking forward to 2021 , It ’ s much harder than normal to make predictions for the next year but here goes :

• We will continue to see association owned shows – primarily in the USA where there is a high proportion of them – either being sold to , or partnering with , traditional exhibition organisers .

• There will be several non-core disposals from the larger organisers . Disruption tends to focus attention on marginal parts of the portfolio , especially when redundancy programmes have depleted resources .

• The revelation that organisers can earn substantial high margin revenues from digital activities will start to attract data companies into the sector via acquisition .

• ‘ Normal ’ M & A transactions will slowly re-start but deals will have a different flavour with more emphasis on partnerships and longer earn-out periods for acquisitions to allow the businesses to grow back to 2019 levels .

It ’ s going to be an uncertain but fascinating year .

Even this is slightly misleading as the first two months of 2020 were at the usual level while the last ten months slowed right down :

Transactions this period ( since March 2020 )

Buyer Business Country Sector

USA USA USA USA USA

Food Finance Education Digital Platform Retail

10 Issue 1 2021 www . exhibitionworld . co . uk