2025 Capital Markets Day Transcript - 17 Nov 2025

Transcript

Disclaimer

This transcript is derived from a recording of the event. Every possible effort has been made to transcribe accurately. However, neither Informa nor BRR Media Limited shall be liable for any inaccuracies, errors, or omissions.

Richard Menzies-Gow: 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 click this. First of all, 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 two 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 Airshow, which is one of our biggest brands, one of our most dynamic brands. I popped along yesterday to see them building it, and 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's 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 the chance to do that, there's a break coming up a bit later and we will run 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 our lead insight products that you'll hear a little bit more about in the presentations today, a new product that we're 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 and 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, 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 Excellency Helal Saeed Al Marri. Helal has more titles than most people, but he is Director General of the Economy and Tourism of Dubai. He's also Director General of the Dubai World Trade Centre, 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'll 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 at the Wall Street Journal. So I'm going to hand over to you Thorold and please take us away.

Thorold Barker: 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?

Stephen A. Carter: [inaudible] might have a different recollection, 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 owns and runs the best events business in the world, Trade Show business in the world." And indeed there had 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.

We'll talk about it 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 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's become more and more of a centre. And Helal can talk much more knowledgeably and more passionately than I about how this has become more and more one of the world's centres. And that led inevitably, I feel, to a conversation that he and I started over a year and a half 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 centre of where the world is increasingly meeting. And that's what led us to where we are now.

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

His Excellency Helal Saeed Almarri: Hello? Okay, it's working now. 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 we look at Dubai's future and where Dubai's 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 airshow tomorrow. It's definitely arguably the best airshow 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 this sector, for us as 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 Centre, 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 that 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 centre 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 Financial Centre's obviously the financial centre for the whole region, and then most of the talent, most of those companies have a lot of their talent base in Dubai.

So 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 healthcare for example, with the convergence of technology and aerospace with all these things happening, we just said, "If brought it together, we're going to be able to multiply in terms of growth rates."

Thorold Barker: Stephen, does this mean that you're 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 via these other countries as well?

Stephen A. Carter: You mean the other countries in the region? Thorold Barker: Correct.

Stephen A. Carter: Well, look, I mean Helal puts it well. I mean 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 skew. I don't think it's an either or, I think it could be and/also because that isn't to say that there aren't other locations in 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 quite-

Thorold Barker: Yeah, please.

His Excellency Helal Saeed Almarri: I mean I can add to that because I think that as you go into each market, 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 of the youth, and you'll 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 country is much more on infrastructure or health tech or depending on the priorities in that particular period of time of the country, of the companies there, of the multinationals and the startup ecosystem and unicorns and everything else, the shows can be developed in that way.

And 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.

Thorold Barker: 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 this crossroads between East and West and Africa and just how it really fits in and the nature of the people coming to events, the mix of people from around the world?

His Excellency Helal Saeed Almarri: 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 UK 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 six to eight-hour flight path, if nothing else. A lot of them cover all emerging markets. A lot of them maybe cover... So if a US company would come to Dubai and then cover the world from Dubai and they have the 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 the sort of Trade Shows in two very distinct types, you have one which is what we might term a more classic Trade Show, which is probably not the airshow, but is more like a Gulfood where you have tens of thousands of brands, very large number of exhibitors, and they're really just booking the revenues for the next six months or the next nine 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, a lot of technology hubs, a lot of the investment from VCs and stuff is coming towards the area. You're getting the attention and you're getting tremendous growth in that area as well. 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 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.

Thorold Barker: How do you see Dubai versus the other centres? I mean, what's special here that really makes it different than the competitor hubs around the world?

Stephen A. Carter: The competitor hubs? Thorold Barker: Yeah,

Stephen A. Carter: Well, I was looking up my favourite answer engine the other day, "How many cities are there in the world with populations of more than 3 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 five, probably, top three for B2B. I mean that's quite something because there are a lot of cities in the world. If you look up how many of those cities have got convention centres, convention centres, 1500.

Convention centres with more than 50,000 square meters,, actually more than you'd think, 3 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 the people in the room will hear later from a 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 introduces themselves, says, "I'm an African," they might be Kenyan or they 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.

His Excellency Helal Saeed Almarri: I mean just on Dubai, I could 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 150 billion is being invested in that. It's on track. It'll be delivered by end of '32. The number of planes Emirates airline has coming as well. I think that's all public information you could see. But if you look at the infrastructure around the industry, I'm not talking about the exhibition centres 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 the different things, you have that consistent growth which allows you to growth 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 services were, but if you're going to go and do a show in that market, you know you've already got 50, 60% of the show 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.

Thorold Barker: So you talk about the regional hub and the infrastructure to bring in people, the airport, the time zone obviously are 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 five years and how much it's 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 top line-

His Excellency Helal Saeed Almarri: Sure, sure. I mean you're talking about the exhibition business or we're talking about generally?

Thorold Barker: Well, the exhibition business, but within the broader frame.

His Excellency Helal Saeed Almarri: Look, if you look Dubai's growth, obviously, so first of all, if we're looking, we have a plan which takes us to 2033, so it's a bit more than five years out. And that plan 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 two 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 two years, a 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.

Thorold Barker: Without naming names.

His Excellency Helal Saeed Almarri: Without naming names, just being taste. It's not Chatham House, so I won't name names, 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's become smaller, people have become more mobile, talent has become more mobile. And so Dubai is really firstly doubling down on all the areas is 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 two 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 and stuff, you see in terms of talent moving here for that. Blockchain, we have the largest franchise 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 three to four 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 five 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.

Thorold Barker: 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've 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?

Stephen A. Carter: 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.

Thorold Barker: Well, sorry.

Stephen A. Carter: I can feel Richard getting itchy.

Thorold Barker: What was the comment you made? Apologies.

His Excellency Helal Saeed Almarri: The quality over the next five years, we are expecting the industry to double.

Thorold Barker: Sorry. Apologies.

His Excellency Helal Saeed Almarri: And the industry could be quite wide, yeah. Stephen A. Carter: These are important nuances.

Thorold Barker: Important nuances. I'm here to ask the questions and you're having to give me the details.

Stephen A. Carter: 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 three. 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 a customer base, you start with the database, you start with the premise, you start with a 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. And 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 as saying, "We've identified these six or seven 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 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 in line on this and he's got deeper experience than me is you have to ask this other question, "What will the winning Trade Show of 5 or 10 years look like?" And that will be a different thing too. It'll be much more thematic, it'll be much more commercially orientated, it'll be much more experiential, it'll be much more distinctive. It may conceivably last for a bit longer, it may have more layers, it may be more multi-layered, 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 your-

His Excellency Helal Saeed Almarri: No, I think you're right. I mean, 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 six 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. We're not doing anything with the existing venue. It's still there for conferences and everything else." Another few months pass and today the team presented to me, they've filled up this venue and they've filled up that venue. So you can't really plan because that wasn't the plan. The plan was to fill up one venue, they're filled up two venues.

So that's one example of a show that's been around I guess 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 in, 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 five years' time, will one of the leading shows be that?" Now again, I know we're on camera and I know Stephen doesn't want to commit, but I would say if I had 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 or 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 it's 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 or I see these emerging new areas are going to

give massive opportunity and leveraging the group's expertise in a lot of the different areas, I think that's really big.

Thorold Barker: And it changes the nature of the brand of Dubai. If you have 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?

Stephen A. Carter: You mean category themes? Thorold Barker: Yeah.

Stephen A. Carter: Sector themes. 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 was talking about. So I definitely agree with that. I mean aviation is a big market. I mean I've stolen it, but to pre-configure, 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 Airshow in the time that I've been coming to Dubai, which is 20-odd years now, the Dubai Airshow has gone from being one of the airshows, I think it would be fair to say then. To being the airshow. 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 location. 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 it can already be an existing theme and then you can expand what you do with a 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.

Thorold Barker: And just, you mentioned globalisation, I mean to what extent are there really significant opportunities for these big franchises to go from sort of annual gatherings in a big forum 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 they things that people want to go multiple times in different places?

His Excellency Helal Saeed Almarri: You want to-

Stephen A. Carter: You go first.

His Excellency Helal Saeed Almarri: I don't think it's as 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.

And they build up over time 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 at a new sector, it'll be all about attracting for example, FDI, it'll be about capacity building, it'll 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 that, with the topic. Because as long as they're getting a very good ROI, the show works really well.

Thorold Barker: Do you want anything for that or keep going? His Excellency Helal Saeed Almarri: Keep going.

Thorold Barker: Going? Yeah, 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 details... 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?

His Excellency Helal Saeed Almarri: So the Dubai World Trade Centre 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-

Thorold Barker: There's plenty to go around.

His Excellency Helal Saeed Almarri: Yeah, there's plenty of opportunity and 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, 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 win-win.

Thorold Barker: 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 that's very much focused on Dubai. Can you talk about how the cultures mesh and the shared philosophy around how you do business?

Stephen A. Carter: Well, I can give you my view. I mean 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 or 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 smaller 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 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 yes, there's some difference for sure, but that's kind of okay. And to one of the points they 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 standalone 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. That's how we think about it.

His Excellency Helal Saeed Almarri: Yeah, 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 Dubai World Trade Centre business being carved out. So there's no major finance functions and other things that need to merge, it's the 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 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 or anything else.

Thorold Barker: So this is not a cost-cutting opportunity.

His Excellency Helal Saeed Almarri: It's not a cost-cutting opportunity. Hopefully the team will actually-

Thorold Barker: Right. That's not in the model.

His Excellency Helal Saeed Almarri: It's not in the model, but hopefully the team are watching it.

So the point is that when we spoke 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 things like corporate culture and stuff, of course there's always going to be, and Stephen has a lot of experience with doing acquisition 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.

Thorold Barker: And the franchises are run quite separately.

His Excellency Helal Saeed Almarri: 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's done really well in Egypt. And then they all want to, the nature of what Steve was saying is they feel they own the business, they're very results-orientated. It is a very entrepreneurial type of people. And so as long as that works for them then it's-

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

Stephen A. Carter: There was nothing about them and just to be clear, 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.

Thorold Barker: The opportunity.

Stephen A. Carter: 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.

Thorold Barker: I know we wanted to do some Q&A and allow folks in the audience. Before I leave, do we have a name yet? Is it Informa International, 1 Co? What are we referring to?

Stephen A. Carter: We don't have name. We don't have a name. It's a bit like having a child. I don't know if you ever found yourself this issue. We did.

His Excellency Helal Saeed Almarri: We have a lot of names. Stephen A. Carter: We've got a lot of names.

Thorold Barker: Well, we had to name our kid before we left the hospital in America, so we were like boom, there was no messing around.

Stephen A. Carter: And where did you go? Where did you go? Thorold Barker: What'd you mean? Which name?

Stephen A. Carter: Yeah.

Thorold Barker: Well, it's a long story. We ended up with Tess Stephen A. Carter: Great name.

Thorold Barker: But it was around about-

Stephen A. Carter: That's not honest. I can tell you it won't be called-Thorold Barker: Tesco.

Stephen A. Carter: ... it won't be called Tesco. Thorold Barker: I think someone's taken that.

His Excellency Helal Saeed Almarri: No, I was just saying I want to excuse myself. I'm not looking at everyone because the light's extremely bright. Stephen's got these reflective glasses, so if you ask questions and I don't look at you, it's not me being rude.

Thorold Barker: We've got seven or eight minutes. Does anyone have a question they'd like to ask for the audience? Yep, here and then the lady behind.

Steve Liechti: Thank you. 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's the execution risk in that on the timing? And just talk us through some of the actions there, please.

Stephen A. Carter: 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 timeline. For a whole host of reasons, I think our thinking is we'll either get it done before we get into Gulfood's 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 we'll get it done shortly thereafter so that it doesn't get in the way of the success of both of those.

Steve Liechti: And just to follow up, when we saw the tech target transaction, I think the accounting was a lot more complicated and fragmented than expected. I mean any views there in terms of technical issues in terms of the merger or transaction?

Stephen A. Carter: 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, so we don't have the, "Pleasure" of reversing 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 categorise 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.

Thorold Barker: The lady at the back. Oh, sorry. Apologies, I didn't see you. If you go next.

Annick Maas: Sorry. Annick Maas 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 an other global player or actually put the 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 are taking share in Dubai from other geographies. Where do you actually see that money coming from mostly or...

His Excellency Helal Saeed Almarri: 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 Centre as an entity, Dubai World Trade Centre 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 looked at first lens was very financial to make sure that we could grow faster and we could do better than we could do by ourself 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 realised that there's a sort of direct fit in terms of not just the team's culture but the ambitions, the geographies we were 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 experience, but he gave a very good 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 five shows in the world and you look at the growth rate of the show here, if we're in the top three and you look at the growth rate and 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 if you take Gulfood, we are, we're growing faster than an Anuga or a SIAL 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.

Annick Maas: Perfect, thank you.

Thorold Barker: Do you want to ask a question here? Yeah, at the front?

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

Stephen A. Carter: I think I'm correctly saying that the next show after Gulfood in the new venue is ours, isn't it?

Thorold Barker: Yeah, it is.

Stephen A. Carter: It's WHX. So that would 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? Did we say that? Richard?

Richard Menzies-Gow: Overall there was a threshold.

Stephen A. Carter: Oh yeah, yeah, that's better. That's what I thought is just the construction of your question I didn't recognise. 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 centre.

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 minimum margin would work for us, which would be different from elsewhere in the world and then we'd 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?

Nick Dempsey: Yes, thanks.

Thorold Barker: We are out of time. Should we do more questions or we should call it a day?

Great, thank you both very much indeed. His Excellency Helal Saeed Almarri: Thanks a lot for having me. Thorold Barker: Of course.

Stephen A. Carter: Okay, well this is an opportunity for me just to repeat a welcome. I know a good number of you have travelled, a bit of a show of hands, hands up for how many people, this is their first time in Dubai. So good for you, good for you. Well listen, I hope you get a lot out of it. It's a fantastic place. And I was at the airshow early this morning, which is why I was not here for the milling

around beforehand because we opened the airshow this morning. You'll get to see it tomorrow for those who are going. Doug can keep me honest, he knows more about the airshow 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 two-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 wanted to take a picture of the actual model and I didn't want to say, "Could you get out of the way because we're taking a picture," but my body language was communicating, "Could you get..." So they turned 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, "Oh, I reckon this will be here before we've even got another runway."

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've 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 as 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 into 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 £1 billion a year. We were making around £200 or so million 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 one, cycle two, cycle three, cycle four. 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 the time was a mixture of different assets and actually our Trade Show business was our smallest business if it had been a standalone 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 to 15,000 spot conferences a year where you're getting 50 people in a room and charging them £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 the 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 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 wandering around trying to persuade people to lend us money because we believed that face-to-face events were going to come back when 90% of the people we met said, "It's never going to happen. Everyone's gone virtual, I'm going to put my money into Hopin. 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 timeline which was to sell at that point, our intelligence

businesses, much better to sell it here because we raised two and a half billion.

Whereas back here when everyone told me to sell it, we did a valuation and we'd have got just over £300 million for our intelligence businesses. So it gave us a lot more money. Now we'd spend a bit of money, about £35 million, to turn those into meaningful businesses, but you'd take that trade every day. That then allowed us to give £1 billion pounds back to shareholders, which we'd 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 in the B2B business, IMEA, and this is pre-the-one-co combination, let's call it Tess. The IMEA 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 a geographic mix, and this more than anything, I think is the big change. The UK where we're listed, where we're domiciled and where we still employ a lot of people, I think just over 3000 people, it isn't the place where the company makes its money and it's increasingly not where the place company looks out at the world to say, "Where is the future of the company going to be?"

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 one what we wanted it to do, and our plan is for it to begin to do that in year two. Today that's pretty much all I'm going to say about TechTarget. As Steve helpfully 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 one.

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'll 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'll 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 VAR, it was essentially two businesses, a journals business, a hundred percent 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 UK markets like Singapore and Australia and to a degree New Zealand.

The books business was 90%, 95% a 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 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 non-physical 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 Informa call the 5% club, which is the base level of performance we've set for businesses inside the group. Penny, Alex and Ayrshot 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 timeline, we're four, five 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 a 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% as 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 we'll 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 operating cash flow into operating profit. If you look at that over the bottom, for those of you at the back of the room can see it, if you take three years of compounding growth at those levels, that's about £630 million of additional revenue. And if that £630 million of additional revenue dropped through at say 40%, you might say, "Why not 50%?" I might argue, well, 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 digitised virtual or alternative solution? You see in sports, you see in music, you see in theatre, 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's not a super big market, but it's big enough, it's 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 maths 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 two 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. This, to be honest, if I went back to my timeline 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 of them, people didn't even know who I was or who we were. In the last four or five 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 recognised 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 two 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,

£500 million back in 2013, just sub £100 million, this year will be just north of

£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 one, 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 two 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 two 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. 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.

This is a slightly rainbow-coloured 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 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've stayed out of extraction industries. So we've made some conscious choices about where we will build our business because we think that 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, yeah, you can take a brand, there's a mothership inside that £220 million, but there are nine 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 goodie 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 a 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 one and a £500 million of revenue here. They range from $15 million... Sorry for the switch, but most of these brands report in dollars. They range from $15 million up to $140 million. We have two brands on their own that make more revenue as a single brand than our entire Trade Show business did 11 years ago. If we stood this business up, I don't know what this says about either our IR capability or how markets price things, but if you stood these 50 brands up as a standalone business and priced it to our valuation today, you'd get the other half of our B3B 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 market's 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 and Andy runs Informa Connect is our more content-led business and Matthieu runs our newest business, if you like, Informa Festivals, our experience-led business.

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 organisation and our approach to it. But what I would say is that today in round numbers, 2 billion of our revenue is here and about another 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 five to seven 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 maximise 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 informal markets because traditionally, sorry, I beg your pardon, 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 multi-layered the event, the easier it is to sell other products and services. And as Richard has 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 three to four years.

Stephen A. Carter: The next three slide 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 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 five years ago it wasn't. So, okay, is there an opportunity for a battery show? Ai, well, what backs up AI? Well, data centers, well, four or five 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. So you go on. So the other thing about markets is they change. They change and they metamorphose 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 plus, possibly even an A minus given I'm in public as colleagues who are in the room will know, I'd probably give as a C minus in a 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 are 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 five or six 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 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 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 Attila'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 two major venues in Riyadh. We've got 20 brands in the portfolio for next year and a million attendees, and the economic impact is remarkable. Today as well as opening the Dubai Airshow, we opened Cityscape Global in Riyadh, that'll 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 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 Edinburgh 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 a space equation, although obviously space matters. As Hilal touched on airport capacity and connections. One of the things I found in the last year, basing myself out of here, the six, seven 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 two five star hotels or one five star hotel, but if you want to run an event with 200,000 attendees, you need very, very good three star, four star, five 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, it 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, that 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 backend 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 rags at the moment in market. It's about $110 million. Tell me if I'm wrong here, Patrick or it connects about 250 festivals, about 130.

The interesting question is what could that number be in three to four 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 three