This month we saw a couple of transactions in Russia and CIS. ITE Group acquired Finmark, which organises the Aqua-therm (heating and ventilation) series of exhibitions in the Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan.
ITE is already in a joint venture with Reed Exhibitions for Aqua-therm Moscow so this was a very logical step in owning the rights to the brand elsewhere. This acquisition is also firmly in line with ITE’s strategy of strengthening its core sectors in its key geographical markets.
Expoforum, which is building 100,000sqm of exhibition halls close to the airport in St Petersburg to be completed in 2013 has acquired 25 per cent of Lenexpo, owner of the main existing halls in the same city.
This is an interesting move as Expoforum was clearly going to be a major competitor to Lenexpo, which needed to raise money to renovate part of the 40-year-old complex and add 20,000sqm to the existing 40,000sqm of indoor space. This model of co-operation should bring some logic to the overall development of exhibition space in St Petersburg and will hopefully make the two centres complementary.
The International Exhibition Centre in Warsaw, Expo XXI has been purchased from the Expomedia Group administrators by Greg Syszyk, Bruce Robinson and an international fund. The new owners have embarked on a new strategy which includes the establishment of a local partner company to assist international organisers who want to penetrate the Polish exhibition market but don’t want to set up their own local infrastructure.
UBM made two small acquisitions in the USA. SharedVue provides marketing automation software and consultancy to technology manufacturers and CenTradeX provides market intelligence tools enabling their customers to manipulate and analyse import/export data.
Finally, we are yet to see any significant acquisitions resulting from the strong interest of many organisers in Brazil. It seems the number of potential buyers may be resulting in a seller’s market mentality with high price expectations from the potential vendors. There are a small number of large independent organisers and it will be interesting to see if anyone is prepared to break the bank to gain a serious foothold there.
