Informa to Buy Clarion for £2.24 Billion, Plans £940 Million Equity Raise and Taylor & Francis Separation

Informa has agreed to acquire Clarion Events from Blackstone for an enterprise value of £2.24 billion, while launching an equity raise of about £940 million and beginning a formal process to separate its Taylor & Francis academic publishing business. The Clarion acquisition is expected to complete toward the end of the fourth quarter of 2026, subject to customary regulatory clearances.

The announcements would push the London-listed group further toward business-to-business live events while potentially removing a large academic publishing operation that has been part of Informa since 2004. Informa said the Taylor & Francis review is considering all options, with the outcome due alongside its 2026 full-year results in March 2027, so the final separation structure has not yet been determined.

Informa set out the plan in its October 6 company update, describing Clarion as the owner of more than 100 specialist B2B brands and saying the acquisition would expand its position in electronics, defence and security, gaming, technology and energy. The same update said current trading remains on track for full-year expectations, including about 6% underlying revenue growth and double-digit growth in underlying earnings per share.

Clarion would add more than 100 event brands

Clarion was established in 1947 and is headquartered in the United Kingdom. Its portfolio includes IFA Berlin in consumer electronics, DSEI in defence and security, ICE in gaming, Distributech in energy and ITC Vegas in insurance technology. Informa said Clarion’s 10 largest category franchises account for about two-thirds of its revenue, giving the buyer immediate scale in several markets where it wants a larger presence.

For calendar 2027, Informa expects Clarion to generate more than £575 million of revenue with an adjusted operating profit margin above 30%. The company also expects roughly 10% underlying revenue growth from Clarion’s annual events, with about £100 million of additional year-on-year revenue from biennial events. Those are forward-looking company estimates rather than completed results.

The acquisition would take Informa’s B2B Live Events operation to more than £4.2 billion, or $5.7 billion, of annual revenue across roughly 1,000 specialist brands, more than 40 market categories and over 30 countries. Management expects the enlarged events business to produce underlying growth of more than 7% annually.

Informa valued Clarion at 11.1 times expected 2027 EBITDA before synergies. It has identified about £50 million of annual run-rate operating savings from areas such as procurement, shared services, event delivery and duplicated corporate costs. It also targets about £25 million of additional annual operating profit from revenue opportunities by 2029, which would bring the valuation multiple to roughly eight times on the company’s estimates when both cost and revenue benefits are included.

Those benefits are not expected to arrive immediately. Informa said roughly a quarter of the full run-rate synergies should be delivered in the first full year of ownership, with the full amount targeted for 2029. One-off costs associated with delivering the savings are expected to be about £50 million.

The £940 million equity raise will part-fund the purchase

The Clarion consideration is to be paid in cash using dedicated acquisition financing alongside the equity raise. Informa plans a non-pre-emptive placing through an accelerated bookbuild and a separate UK retail offer through RetailBook. The company is targeting gross proceeds of approximately £940 million from the equity issue, and the issue price is to be set after the bookbuild closes.

Informa also said it will pause its existing share buyback programme and redirect capital toward the acquisition. On its projections, pro-forma net debt to EBITDA should remain below three times at the end of 2026 and fall below 2.5 times by the end of 2027. Management forecasts that the acquisition will increase adjusted diluted earnings per share by a mid-single-digit percentage in 2027 and produce a post-tax return on invested capital above 10% by the third full year of ownership in 2029.

Blackstone has owned Clarion since acquiring the events company in 2017 from Providence Equity Partners. Under Informa’s current plan, Clarion chief executive Lisa Hannant would remain in her role after completion and join Informa’s executive leadership team. Informa also said Hannant will roll a portion of her Clarion equity into Informa shares.

The first three to six months after completion are expected to focus on keeping Clarion operating against its existing 2027 plans and budgets. Informa has said it then intends to use its international infrastructure, customer data capabilities and commercial relationships to extend Clarion brands into additional markets and develop more revenue from areas such as data services, sponsorship and partnerships with host cities and hotels.

Taylor & Francis separation remains an options review

The second major change announced on October 6 concerns Taylor & Francis, which Informa classifies as its Academic Markets business. The publisher is approaching $1 billion in annual revenue and is growing at about 4% on an underlying basis, according to Informa. Its portfolio includes more than 2,700 peer-reviewed journals, and the group says annual published articles have risen to more than 170,000 since Taylor & Francis became part of Informa in 2004.

Informa has formally launched a separation process but has not committed to a specific route. The company said the review will consider all options that could support Taylor & Francis’s future development while giving the business greater independence and flexibility. That means the October announcement should not be read as a completed spin-off, sale or demerger.

The result of the review is scheduled to be reported with Informa’s full-year results in March 2027. Until then, investors have two separate milestones to watch: completion of the Clarion acquisition, which Informa expects toward the end of the fourth quarter of 2026, and the later decision on how Taylor & Francis will be separated from the group.