Exhibition World Issue 3 2024 Issue 3 | Page 25

Research

Phil Soar

Morrison has recently looked at our industry and , knowing all these businesses , he has created his own analysis and rankings .

What ’ s valuable about his summary is that he has excluded all of the exhibition operations , owned and run by countries , regions and cities – the reason being that they are never going to be sold on any open market , their objectives are not comparable , they are not shareholder orientated , and it is almost impossible to extricate exhibition revenues from all the other venue turnover .

This then excludes the Italian , Spanish and German Fiera / Messen and companies like Comexposium , which since its bankruptcy is owned by French state players

( Compexposium would rank third or fourth if included ).

Below are Morrison ’ s findings and assumptions , in order of size .

The number is the annual turnover in sterling for a single 12 months , in the period 2021- 24 , depending on the latest data available .

Inevitably , therefore , there is bound to be some estimation in the numbers as some may be even two years out of date .

Coming after these 12 are a small number of reasonably-sized companies . Several are still familycontrolled or managed – Mark Allen , William Reed and Montgomery . Then , there are a small number of fast-growing businesses in the £ 30-50m range – e . g . Media10 and Nineteen .

The list attempts to include only trade show / exhibition groups and excludes companies which are essentially conference-led . It also does not include trade association events in the US , which can be quite large but are single .

It is striking how different this list is from the same presentation of 1999 / 2000 – a quarter century ago . That would have been dominated by Reed , EMAP , Penton , VNU , DMG , UBM and Comdex – the first six all being

publicly listed companies .

Size doesn ’ t necessarily translate to value Morrison also draws assumptions about how valuable each of these companies are – and this does not necessarily relate to turnover . For instance , he speculates that Questex might be sold for US $ 550m , Clarion may be valued at £ 1.5bn and CloserStill at £ 1bn .

But Emerald , despite being the fourth largest organiser in terms of turnover , is , according to Morrison ’ s research worth US $ 600m at ‘ enterprise value ’ ( that is the total value before taking off debt ). Emerald has been talking to prospective buyers for several months and Morrison may have inside information on that process . Any business is worth only what someone will pay for it after all .

Debt is also a critical consideration for all of these companies . Morrison observes that ARC has spent £ 300m to acquire several assets from scratch – this is an excellent model , but it does mean that the amount of debt relative to turnover and profit will tend to be rather higher than for companies which have largely grown organically ( like Terrapin , Easyfairs and CloserStill ).

Morrison also speculates about what will happen to these companies in the near future . Except for Informa , he speculates that every single one of the 12 could be sold to future investors .

RX seems unlikely , and its ultimate sale has been under discussion for three decades . DMG is a valuable asset , but with the group now being privately owned and possibly seeking funds to buy the Daily Telegraph , any sale would be a long way off .

It would ( we presume ) be of interest to the industry to try to produce the Top 20 or 30 UK organisers each year . We shall endeavour to work on that . EW

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