Informa agrees to buy Clarion for £2.24 billion and plans to separate Taylor & Francis

Informa, the London-listed company behind trade shows such as Black Hat and CPHI, agreed on Tuesday to buy rival events organizer Clarion from Blackstone for an enterprise value of about £2.24 billion, or roughly $2.96 billion. In the same announcement, Informa said it would separate Taylor & Francis, the academic publisher it has owned since 2004.

The two moves point the company in one direction. Informa is concentrating on business-to-business events, where companies pay to exhibit, sponsor and attend, and stepping back from academic journals and books.

This is an agreement, not a completed deal. Informa expects the purchase to close toward the end of the fourth quarter, subject to customary regulatory approvals.

What Informa is buying

Clarion, founded in 1947 and based in the U.K., runs more than 100 trade events. Its best known include IFA Berlin, which Informa describes as the world's largest consumer electronics event, the DSEI defense and security show in London, the ICE gaming show in Barcelona, and Distributech, a power transmission and distribution event in North America. Its 10 largest event franchises bring in two-thirds of its revenue.

Informa expects Clarion to generate more than £575 million of revenue in 2027, with adjusted operating margins above 30%. The price works out to 11.1 times Clarion's expected 2027 EBITDA, a measure of operating earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization. Informa puts the multiple at about 9 times after £50 million a year of cost savings it says it has identified, and about 8 times if it also hits a target of £25 million of extra operating profit from new revenue by 2029.

The company said the deal should lift adjusted diluted earnings per share by a mid-single-digit percentage in 2027 and earn a post-tax return on invested capital above 10% by 2029. Clarion's chief executive, Lisa Hannant, will stay in charge of the business and join Informa's executive leadership team.

With Clarion added, Informa expects its events business to bring in more than £4.2 billion of revenue a year from about 1,000 brands, up from more than £3 billion across over 800 brands today. Aviation Week, a trade publication Informa owns, reported that the purchase ends a pause on acquisitions that followed an earlier run of dealmaking.

How Informa will pay

Informa will pay for Clarion in cash. Informa is funding the deal with dedicated acquisition financing and about £940 million, or roughly $1.24 billion, from selling new shares. Those shares equal about 9% of its existing share capital.

Most of the stock is being sold to institutional investors through an accelerated bookbuild, a fast sale run by banks that opened Tuesday morning with Morgan Stanley as sole global coordinator and BofA Securities and Deutsche Bank as joint bookrunners. The price will be set when the book closes, which is expected no later than 6 p.m. London time on Tuesday. Informa's largest institutional shareholder has said it intends to take part in proportion to its holding, and directors and senior managers will buy up to £1.6 million of shares. A separate offer lets U.K. retail investors buy at the same price, with a minimum of £250, and the new shares are expected to start trading on October 8.

Informa is also pausing its share buyback to put that cash toward the deal. It expects net debt to stay below 3 times EBITDA at the end of 2026 and to fall below 2.5 times by the end of 2027.

A separate future for Taylor & Francis

Taylor & Francis publishes more than 2,700 peer-reviewed journals and more than 170,000 articles a year. Its revenue has grown about fourfold since it joined Informa in 2004 and is now approaching $1 billion, growing at about 4% a year. That is slower than the 6% underlying growth Informa is guiding to for the whole group this year, and the 7% or more it expects from the enlarged events business.

Informa has formally launched a separation process and says it is reviewing all options. It has not said whether that means a sale, a separate listing or another structure. It plans to report the outcome alongside its 2026 full-year results in March 2027.

Trading and the share price

Informa also said current trading is on track. It kept its 2026 guidance for underlying revenue growth of about 6% and double-digit growth in underlying earnings per share, and said it has more than $1 billion of fourth-quarter revenue already booked and committed.

The shares opened lower in London, at 848 pence against Monday's close of 861.8 pence, then turned higher. By 8:26 a.m. London time they were up 1.5% at 874.6 pence, giving the company a market value of about £11 billion. They remain below the 1,000 pence they reached last November.