The Scottish play…
Stephen A Carter (Lord Carter), Informa plc Group C
Executive, in a rare interview, speaks to SISO Chair a
Tarsus CEO Doug Emslie about acquisitions, Covid and
exhibitions of the future
tephen A Carter had
been booked in as
the keynote for SISO’s
annual CEO Summit, 31
March, a physical event subsequently
cancelled due to Covid-19. The
association Chair and fellow Scot,
Doug Emslie, however, teased the
good Lord into the virtual world for a
SISO all-Scottish Q&A session, 7 May.
Paul Colston reports:
Stephen Carter has been leading
Informa plc since taking over from
Peter Rigby in 2013. It has been a
busy seven years for a business still
spread across three markets: events,
education and data & information
services.
Carter saw his task as a “strategic
question”, which of those sectors
Informa should develop out of at
the time. He concluded that the
advanced learning business would
not allow Informa to consolidate
quickly and had relatively low
growth. Moreover, the company was
the fourth or fifth player in that field.
“In information services we
were playing at the edges, a bit-part
player and to reach scale from shaky
foundations is always difficult,” he
added.
That left events, where Informa
was big in the conference market
(although the internet posed a threat
there), although the tradeshow
business was particularly good,
despite the single largest player
being Reed.
Carter noted that Reed’s holding
company had not then been deploying
significant capital to develop at
scale, something, “that gave us an
opportunity and has driven us for the
last six years,” he said.
Emslie asked Carter how h
had approached the Informa
restructuring. “The company
culture was very human, agi
entrepreneurial and the oper
model was changed to give th
company the licence to scale
tradeshows,” he said. One cri
was to ask, he said, ‘Is there t
in the businesses we are buy
that could become talent in o
company?’
M&A
Acquisitions duly followed in
event and publishing compan
bought for cash in 2014. It wa
Carter, “a perfect fit and we s
added a beauty business in C
get a foothold there”.
US organiser Hanley Wood
followed, giving Informa ano
major regional foothold, this
America. Other brands were
before the substantial acquis
US-based organiser Penton fo
billion dollars in 2016.
By this time there was no d
Informa’s strategy of building
scaled position in the tradefa
sector. Carter described it as
liberating moment. We were
public”.
The strong following throu
intent, he added, made the pr
easier when the next acquisi
came up.
Penton’s business, of cours
not just tradeshows, but rath
mixed media business, which
the Informa profile well, whi
allowing the company to dou
down on large-scale industri
tradeshows focusing on Nort
America in the first instance.
www.exhibitionworld.co.uk