Steve Monnington, managing director, Mayfield Media Strategies on some of the exhibition deals made in the second quarter of 2016.
14 deals involving 12 different buyers in 8 countries, 5 of them consumer businesses. An IPO involving a market capitalisation of £800m, a major organiser entering a new market and a top executive leading a management buyout of an Australian consumer business. This is a typical three months activity in the world of exhibition M&A, meaning that there is no such thing as a typical deal.
At the top end of the scale we have the IPO (stock market flotation) of Ascential (recently renamed from Top Right Group) after many months of negotiations with a number of private equity funds in a parallel process to the flotation discussions. The company decided it could maximise its value by going along the IPO route and floated at 200p a share giving it a market cap of around £800m. Guardian Media Group, which owns around a third of the business, and Apax, which owns two-thirds, bought the business in 2007 for around £1bn.
We have dmg events making a geographic play in Africa with the acquisition of South Africa based organiser, Exhibition Management Services (EMS) run by John Thomson who, with over 35 years of history, is one of the longest established organisers and entrepreneurs in the region. The principle event is Africa’s Big Seven, the continents biggest food and beverage trade exhibition held in Johannesburg. This represents a new sector for DMG and EMS provides an infrastructure and base to further develop their business in South Africa and across the wider African continent.
Then we have Matt Pearce, International Director for Australasia for Diversified Communications resigning his job to lead an MBO of Diversified’s Australian consumer shows consisting of the Good Food & Wine Shows and Fitness & Health Expos, willing to take a chance and demonstrating perfectly that the lifeblood of the exhibition sector is the entrepreneurial spirit.
Large parts of the portfolios of most of the major organisers have been acquired from entrepreneurs and IPO’s such as Ascential wouldn’t have been possible without the creation and development of businesses by individual entrepreneurs. Evanta, the U.S organiser of executive leadership conferences is a good example of the cycle. The business was founded by Bob Dethlefs and was sold to DMG in 2006. DMG sold it on in 2012 to Leeds Equity Partners for £58m (equivalent to $93m at that time). Leeds Equity has now flipped it less than 4 years later selling it to CEB for $275m, a gain of $182m or roughly 200%. CEB continue the trend of non-events companies buying into the live events sector. Its an impressive valuation growth profile but it all started with the entrepreneur.
