Events firm Informa to buy Clarion for £2.24 billion from Blackstone

Oct 6 (Reuters) - Britain's Informa said on Tuesday it would buy events organiser Clarion for £2.24 billion ($3 billion) and separate its Taylor & Francis academic publishing arm, as it focuses on expanding its fast-growing live events business.

Shares of Informa, the world's largest exhibitions group, rose 4%.

Informa proposed raising £940 million in new equity to partly fund the acquisition of UK-based Clarion, which owns over 100 business-to-business live event brands. 

Informa CEO Stephen Carter said it was time for the group to focus on B2B events, which now accounted for the vast majority of its earnings and growth.

"To that end, we're adding another portfolio of brands to our business, Clarion Events, which is a very complementary fit," he said.

Clarion's current owner US-based private equity firm Blackstone launched formal sale process of the events group last year, Reuters previously reported, though it failed to find a buyer at a proposed valuation, people familiar with the matter said at the time.

Dealmaking in the sector has since picked up as investors view live events businesses as relatively insulated from the rise of artificial intelligence.

Earlier this year, B2B events organiser Hyve Group, agreed to a $1.8 billion sale to private equity firm Hellman & Friedman, while Searchlight Capital Partners acquired a stake in CloserStill Media in a $1.73 billion deal.

"We believe Informa is the ideal partner for Clarion’s next chapter,” Lionel Assant, global co-chief investment officer at Blackstone said.

The deal would be one of Informa's largest acquisitions in recent years. In 2018, Informa acquired conference organiser UBM for £3.8 billion.

The deal sharpens Informa's equity story around a scaled, faster-growing pure-play B2B platform, while setting up a simplified portfolio via the planned separation of Taylor & Francis, J.P.Morgan analysts said in a note.

ACADEMIC ARM SEPARATION 

Informa said it had launched a formal separation process to review all options for Taylor & Francis — whose annual revenue is approaching $1 billion and growing at about 4% per year — and would report the outcome alongside its full-year results in March 2027.

Carter said Informa's academic business had continued to grow, but it was time to focus. "We think both businesses will be better as standalone businesses," he said.

Taylor & Francis has been a beneficiary of AI companies using research to train their models. In 2024, its performance was boosted by data access agreements with AI companies, although a lower rate of revenue contribution in 2025 had hurt its underlying performance.  

The business, which accounted for about 17% of Informa's revenue in 2025, has been expanding beyond traditional academic publishing into open-access research, data and digital research services.

($1 = 0.7571 pounds)

(Reporting by Yamini Kalia and Yadarisa Shabong in Bengaluru, Paul Sandle and Amy-Jo Crowley in London; Editing by Mrigank Dhaniwala, Emelia Sithole-Matarise and Tomasz Janowski)