Mayfield Media’s Steve Monnington on the latest international mergers and acquisitions activity in the exhibition industry.
M&A activity in the last month was primarily in the UK with a number of small deals. Interestingly, the purchasers were not the usual suspects.
Centaur Media, who is better known as a show launching business, made its first acquisition since 2007.
The Forum for Expatriate Management (FEM) runs the Global Mobility Summit and the Totally Expat Show in the UK and the US and runs a web-based community of HR professionals responsible for managing expatriates within international corporate companies.
This fits well with the Employee Benefits part of Centaur’s business. The purchase price was £2.5m (US$4.1m) but Centaur picked up £1m in assets at completion, which means the multiple on historic profits of £400,000 looks quite low by current market standards. However, there is a sizeable potential £4.25m earn out.
Brintex also made a relatively rare acquisition, buying Road Expo from Faversham House. Road Expo is held in both Scotland and Ireland and the two events are market leaders in their respective countries for the road and traffic management sector.
CloserStill Media has been quiet on the acquisition front recently, but in April announced a new investment fund and made two acquisitions. The organiser seems to target below-the-radar businesses and likes to find entrepreneurs who have scalable products and who will stay with the business to drive the development. Both of these acquisitions seem to fulfil those criteria.
The first of these, Biofuels Media, operates the annual European Bioenergy Expo and Conference (EBEC) at Stoneleigh Park and runs an information portal for the renewable energies market. This is one of the fastest growth sectors for exhibitions. Richard Price, the principal will now oversee the newly created Closer2 Alternative Energy division.
CloserStill acquired Red Publishing and Events, owner of Cloud Expo Europe and Enterprise, Cloud and Virtualisation Magazine. Cloud Expo is an early stage business in the Cloud Computing arena, one of the areas of technology tipped for massive growth. Maggie Meer the principal will head the newly created Closer2 Technology division.
It’s interesting CloserStill has launched a second fund rather than adding to the first and maybe this intimates that the businesses in the first fund are closer to being sold than we might have thought.
Over in Asia, UBM has tidied up part of the portfolio acquired in the US$287m Canon Communications deal last September. EDN China and EDN Asia, publications and websites for the Electronic Design sector which were acquired in the Canon deal, have been sold to eMedia Asia, a joint venture between Global Sources and UBM. eMedia Asia already runs several competing properties including Electronic Design China, so it was inevitable that UBM would need to avoid the conflict of interest between itself and its JV partner.
With a number of deals in the due diligence and legal process at the moment, the next couple of months should also prove interesting.
Any comments? Email exhibitionworld@mashmedia.net
