Steve Monnington (pictured), managing director of Mayfield Media Strategies
The M&A market remained subdued in 2021 although transaction rates picked up in the last quarter. The year 2020 showed a significant drop in the number of transactions from the usual 70-80 down to 41. And 2021, with a full 12 months Covid effect, would have shown a further significant decrease but, thanks to 11 deals in November and December, started to bounce back. Overall, there were 39 transactions with 25 different buyers prepared to invest.
Tarsus and Emerald were the busiest in terms of the number of transactions. While Emerald continues to focus solely on the USA, Tarsus picked up businesses in USA, China and Mexico. Blackstone scooped the award for the largest transaction with the acquisition of International Data Group for an enterprise value of $1.3bn. The US continued to lead the way as the busiest M&A market with 15 of the 39 transactions, followed by 10 in the UK.
There were several notable highlights:
1. Private Equity owners continue to show faith in the exhibition sector
Clearly, the exit timetables for the more established exhibition investments such as Blackstone/Clarion and Providence/CloserStill Media will have been put back a few years given how Covid disrupted their profits in 2020 and 2021. However, they remained supportive and both companies made acquisitions in the last quarter.
The PE firms that were newer to the exhibition sector also weren’t put off by the last two years. Apiary Capital backed Roar B2B with the acquisition of a large part of the Prsym portfolio at the end of 2019 and didn’t run their first event until September 2021. However, this didn’t stop them making a further acquisition – the Environment Media Group, organiser of Let’s Recycle Live - in August 2021.
The pandemic also didn’t stop Simon Foster’s new company, Arc, from attracting investment from EagleTree Capital and Canson Capital Partners, unusually before they had even found their first acquisition. Two deals followed - both in the agriculture sector - Farmers Guardian and Lamma from the AgriBriefing portfolio and Farm Business Innovation acquired from Fortem International (formerly Prsym Group).
2. There is increasing interest in different event models
1-2-1 meetings, roundtables and executive briefings are all business models that are attracting increasing attention. In previous years, Emerald, Clarion and Tarsus have all made acquisitions outside the traditional exhibition/conference model and 2021 saw several acquisitions of what has become known as 1-2-1 businesses. Hyve acquired 121 Group (1-2-1 events for mining investment), Clarion acquired Consero Group (in-person and digital 1-2-1 forums and boardroom-style roundtables) and CloserStill Media invested in Influence Group (invite-only forums, 1-2-1 meetings and virtual roundtables).
For CloserStill this is a first move outside their usual model of larger scale content-driven exhibitions and also represents a move into a number of new sectors including retail, senior living, food service, hospitality and education.
3. Non-core disposals
I am surprised that the pandemic hasn’t made the larger organisers look more closely at disposing of parts of their portfolio. Clarion moved its South Africa business into the ownership of the management, with the newly created Vuka Group, while Hyve sold its Kazakhstan business completing its exit from the former CIS, having sold its Azerbaijan and Uzbekistan portfolios in 2020. I’m sure we will see more rationalisation of portfolios this year.
