Informa plc (INF.L) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good afternoon, everybody, in the room. Welcome to Informa's 2025 Capital Markets Day. Hello also to everyone online. We've got a few hundred people joining us. I suspect it's good morning to most of them or an early good morning to others who are joining from America. But thank you very much for joining us. We're excited to be here. We have a packed agenda. see if I can first of all, say welcome to Dubai. I know lots of you haven't been here before. Some of you have. But part of the idea of running this in Dubai was so everyone can feel the vibrancy of this amazing city, this amazing place and also just get a bit more understanding of how deep Informa has roots in Dubai and the wider region and the opportunities that, that's bringing us both today and in the future. So we've got 2 days. Today is really a chance to talk and have conversations and hear from some of our leaders across the region, some of our partners. And then tomorrow, we're going to spend the day together at the Dubai Air Show, which is one of our biggest brands, one of our most dynamic brands. I popped along yesterday to see them building it. It's a truly visual feast, and I'm sure we'll get a lot out of that tomorrow when we're there in person. It's quite a busy agenda for the afternoon. You'll see there's a theme, compounding growth. Growth has always been a theme for us, certainly since Stephen took over and led us. And really, we think we're at a stage now where we can look forward and have some confidence about compounding the levels of growth that we're delivering and all the benefits that come with that. So we've got a series of presentations and conversations that speak to that theme from various different colleagues across the group. Hopefully, you had a chance to sample if you're in the room, a few of our product demonstrations that were going on from across the group. If you didn't get a chance to do that, there's a break coming up a bit later, and we will run a sort of a mini session in all of them again. So don't be shy to jump down there and see if you can get involved. Lots of themes coming through them. Data really at the core of most of them, whether that's LeadInsights products that you'll hear a little bit more about in the presentations today, a new product that we're really selling throughout our -- beginning to sell throughout our events businesses, whether it's about the AI dividend that we talk about and how we're leveraging data and Elysia inside our own business to speed up everything we do and drive efficiencies to spend more time on other things, whether it's to do with AI and how we're using that to really drive integrity in our research product in Taylor & Francis or just a pure data product, Informa TechTarget and how we're really using our data and technology to develop new lead generation products in that business. So do get -- if you get a chance, go and drop in on some of those. But I don't want us to hold up. I want us to get straight into the agenda. We're very lucky for the first session that we've got some great guests with us. Very delighted to have His Excellence Helal Saeed Al Marri. Helal has more titles than most people, but he is Director General of the Economy & Tourism of Dubai. He's also Director General of the Dubai World Trade Center, who, of course, is a close partner of ours already, and we're trying to deepen that partnership. Stephen, I hope you know, Stephen Carter, Informa's Group Chief Executive. If you don't, you might be in the wrong meeting, but don't worry. It will still be good. And we're very lucky that we have Thorold Barker with us today to moderate a conversation between Helal and Stephen. Thorold, you may well know from his time as Editor of the Lex column at the FT and also as the EMEA Editor of the Wall Street Journal. So I'm going to hand over to you, Thorold, and please take it away.

Thank you very much indeed, and welcome, everybody. So I wanted to start. There's obviously this very exciting opportunity of bringing together the businesses here in Dubai. But I want to start, Stephen, with you quickly. Just can you give a sense of where this all began and sort of why this was so attractive to you in the first place?

I won't allow me to have a different regulation, so he can keep me honest. But it really -- for me, at least, it all started in Dubai because it all started in Dubai, and therefore, that's why we're -- has led us to here. When I was given the opportunity to run Informa, my predecessor, who Helal knew pretty well, I would say, said to me, you need to get to know Helal. He runs -- owns and runs the best events business in the world, trade show business in the world. And indeed, there have been prior discussions between Peter and Helal about other opportunities. So I came here in 2013, and I went to see Helal. I think I was only kept waiting 20 minutes before I got to see him. And I got a real sense even then for what was being done here in the trade show market. At the time, we'll talk about this a bit later. At the time, Informa owned, I think, about 9 or 10 trade shows in the world, 11 if you include the Monaco Yacht Show as a trade show, which it isn't really. It's a different animal. And we decided then at Informa that we would separate out our, at the time, relatively small trade show portfolio into a separate operating business, and we would see whether or not we could really become a player in this market. And as a signal of our ambition, we called this business global exhibitions, even though we only had 8 of them. So we had a sense of where we were going to go. Over the years, I've been in and out of Dubai a lot. Our business here has got bigger and bolder and it has become more and more of a center, and Helal can talk much more knowledgeably and more passionately than I about how this has become more and more one of the world centers. And that led inevitably, I feel, to a conversation that he and I started over 1.5 years ago that maybe the way in which we could -- there was a mutual benefit was to put the businesses together and really create a scale business in the center of where the world is increasingly meeting. And that's what led us to where we are now.

And Helal what does it bring for you? I mean you've got these very -- and we'll get on to this in a minute, but these very serious ambitions for Dubai as a center for tourism and a center for events. Can you talk a little bit about what this brings to you in terms of turbocharging that?

Okay. So first of all, welcome to Dubai, everyone. I heard there's people -- it's their first time in Dubai, which is -- so I have to say welcome there. When Dubai -- when we look at Dubai's future and where Dubai is going, everything Dubai is doing is to build itself as a leading global city. And back to the word global that was mentioned, it's important for us at the forefront of that is people coming and meeting, is talent being attracted to Dubai? Is the right business being conducted in Dubai? And the great thing about the trade business, trade show business and conferences and everything else is it really does bring together the best minds and it does bring together the trade across sectors. And as we started to look at that and as we've been growing, we do have leading shows. Of course, you're going to see the air show tomorrow. It's definitely arguably the best air show in the world. Some weeks ago, we had the largest technology show in the world. In January, we will be opening our new venue, which I'll come back to in a second, with the largest food show in the world. So as you start to look at where we're going with this business or the sector, for us is Dubai, it's really about having these global leading events that are must attend that actually get all the investment. And that was evident even through COVID because we were the first to come back to events and you had all these companies not doing events all over the world except Dubai. And so we're really looking to build on that. Now one thing within that is what we're talking about here is our events business. As Dubai World Trade Center, we also have a venue business where we are working on doubling the size of the venue. The first phase of that gets delivered at the end of this year. So we'll have more than 50% extra capacity. And then by the end of that year, we'll go to more 100% extra capacity. So of course, with this capacity, where we've been capacity constrained for a while, comes great growth opportunity here. And out of here, we've also seen the regional markets, whether it's Africa, Middle East, India, the whole sort of region is showing tremendous growth in terms of the underlying economies are doing well. The underlying economies are showing great signs of growth. And if you take a step back a little bit that ultimately, you have finance, you have trade and you have people. And Dubai is really at the center of that for that whole region. DP World controls most of the ports, most of the free ports and everything else in the wider region. Dubai International Finance centers, obviously, the financial center for the whole region. And then most of the talent is -- most of those companies have a lot of their talent base in Dubai. So kind of -- there's this big opportunity for a much faster-growing area out of Dubai. And we looked at our businesses, I think, and we just saw that we are extremely strong in a number of sectors. And then in the sectors we don't have anything in, obviously, Informa is very, very strong. And then with the convergence of technology and health care, for example, with the convergency of technology in aerospace, all these things happening, we just said if we brought it together, we're going to be able to multiply in terms of growth rates.

Stephen, does this mean that you are going to -- obviously, this is not just a deal that covers Dubai, it covers the broader region. Is this going to mean that your investment is further skewed towards Dubai because of these massive increases in capacity and other things. Is this going to really transform your business in terms of your focus vis-a-vis these other countries as well?

You mean the other countries in the region?

Correct.

Well, look, I mean, Helal puts it well. I mean it's -- our business thrives where you operate a nexus of buyers meet sellers, importers meet exporters, distributors meet wholesalers. That's the essence of the business. And Dubai has taken a long-standing world-leading position in that. And there's more capacity coming into this market. We have a significant portfolio of brands and sectors, some of which are here, but not all of which are here. I'm not sure I'd use the word SKU. I don't think it's an either/or. I think it could be an and also because that isn't to say that there aren't other locations of the world which equally are looking to expand in other geographies, South America, Africa, Southeast Asia. But the time zone and location advantages of Dubai in this region are pretty unique. And as a nexus and a meeting point, I think there's a real opportunity to create something...

Yes, please.

I mean I can add to that because I think that as you go into each market, a lot of people see -- people often have the mindset of one market, right? So if you think about Africa, it's not one market, right? And so the priority, for example, in Morocco when it comes to technology is very different than maybe the priority in Nigeria or the priority in Kenya. And so the show which is developed using our collective portfolio in that market and what is done with the stakeholders there, they become very different to each other. And the bottom line is that whilst one is thinking maybe about capacity building, right, of the youth. And you will find lots of technology training providers, you'll find lots of companies that are innovating in that space at that show. The other one is thinking the other countries much more on infrastructure or health tech or, or, or. And depending on the priorities in that particular period of time of the country, of the companies of the multinationals and the start-up ecosystem and unicorns and everything else, the shows could be developed in that way. And I would -- obviously, with my role and where I'm sitting, Dubai is the biggest opportunity, always. But the ability to export that out of here to those markets with ease because of the relationship of the UAE with those markets, but also because of how the talent flows backwards and forwards, I think that's where the critical point is. And I don't think it's exactly as Stephen said, there's no or in this. If a pie is growing, then it's about us together grabbing more and more market share and riding that growth.

So really, this is the hub and then you will, in these other countries, have the offshoots that are more specific to those countries. If you look at brand Dubai, you're obviously in charge of tourism as well as the events business. Can you talk a little bit more about the crossroads between East and West and Africa and just sort of how it really fits in and the nature of the people coming to events, the mix of people from around the world?

Look, I think it's changed over time. And if I look today, first of all, you start with Dubai itself, let's take a step back from the events industry. I mean the people that are coming here for business meetings in general, the multinationals that are based here. And when I say multinationals, I don't necessarily mean U.K. or European or American multinationals, they might be Asian multinationals, Africa multinationals that are based here. They're really serving the world from here. And they're definitely serving the 6- to 8-hour flight path, right, if nothing else. A lot of them cover all emerging markets, a lot of them maybe cover -- so if a U.S. company would come to Dubai and then cover the world from Dubai, and they have international headquarters here. So with that, we're seeing -- and again, on trade, definitely you've got the South-South trade. But you've also got people putting -- because of the resilience they're looking for in supply chain and everything else, people are putting hubs here as well. Now if you jump to the exhibition business, with all of the -- you have effectively, if I split sort of trade shows in 2 very distinct types. You have one, which is what we might term a more classic trade show, which is probably not the air show, but it's more like a Gulfood, right, where you have tens of thousands of brands, a very large number of exhibitors and they're really just booking the revenues for the next 6 months or the next 9 months. Because of the trade routes and because of how the global trade is here, those are growing really strong, and they're taking market share from other geographies. The second thing is you have something more like a Gitex, which is about technology or you have North Star, which is the largest start-up show in the world. And because the innovation is happening in a much wider area here, and a lot of the research out a lot of the technology hubs and a lot of the investment from VCs and stuff is coming towards, you're getting the attention and you're getting tremendous growth in that area as well. So -- but again, what I want to reiterate just on that point is it's not just Dubai because a lot of these other markets, if you look at India, if you look at Saudi, if you look at some -- definitely a number of countries in Africa, CIS, other places there you're seeing tremendous potential and each one is sort of carving out its own niche, which supports that.

How do you see Dubai versus the other centers? I mean what's special here that really makes it different than the competitor hubs around the world.

The competitor hubs. Well, I was looking up my favorite answer engine the other day, how many cities are there in the world with populations of more than 3 million or 4 million? And if my answer engine is correct, which, of course, it might be, but might not be 100% correct, the answer is about 350. If you look at it from a B2B point of view in the way in which Helal describes it, I mean, where is Dubai in that list? Top 5, probably, top 3 for B2B, I mean, that's quite something because there are a lot of cities in the world. You look up how many of those cities have got convention centers. Convention centers, 1,500. Convention centers with more than 50,000 square meters, actually more than you think, 300 or 400. So it's a competitive market. So where does Dubai rank? Dubai ranks very, very highly. But I would echo Helal's broader point about the geography here, and we are seeing that. I mean you'll hear later or the people in the room will hear later from Yogesh, who runs our business in India, from Atilla who runs our business in Turkey, from Annabelle, who co-runs our business in Saudi Arabia. The region more broadly, then you go down into Africa. And you're absolutely right. You very rarely meet someone who introduced themselves says, I'm an African. There might be Kenyan or there might be Nigerian, but they're not -- and each of these are very distinctive markets. One of the things we have found has been a path to success as our company has grown is you have to own the brands. You have to have increasingly service technology. You definitely need good data. But what you also need is you need talent in the market that knows how to adapt the brand to the market. And we bring that in many markets. That's a big advantage.

I mean just on Dubai, I can give a few more anecdotes about Dubai, which I think will resonate. I mean, right now, Dubai is developing the largest airport in the world, right near the airshow where you're going to go and visit tomorrow. Over GBP 150 billion is being invested in that. It's on track. It will be delivered by end of '32. The number of planes Emirates Airline has coming as well. I think that's all public information you can see. But if you look at the infrastructure around the industry, I'm not talking about the exhibition centers and how much we're building or the IP that we're looking to import to bring in and everything else. If you just look at what's supporting that in terms of 60,000 more hotel rooms coming, all different things, you have that consistent growth, which allows you to grow. And it's there and it's already committed and the track record is there of it being delivered year after year after year. That's why I think we're excited here. And a lot of the customers that we get here are also interested in those other markets. So when you're going to a show, this is very technical now, probably diving too deep in terms of how the shows work. But if you're going to go and do a show in that market, you know you've already got 50%, 60% of the shows sold from your existing customers that are here in Dubai, and they want to go into those markets with you. And so it kind of follows. So you're not having to reinvent any wheel, you're not having to do anything else. And then obviously, the cost of investment is much less. And so it works well when you're trying to drive bottom line growth.

So when we -- you talk about the regional hub and the infrastructure to bring in people, the airport, the time zone, obviously very good, the regional hubs of businesses and then this reputation and this brand for being a good place to come and do business in this form. Can you talk a little bit about -- before we came on stage, we were talking about -- I've not been here for 5 years and how much has changed. Can you just talk a little bit about 10 years out, what is your vision for how all of these things fit together and how big this can get? Can you give your sort of show, like...

Sure. I mean, you're talking about the Exhibition business, you're talking about generally?

Well, the Exhibition business, but within the broader frame.

Look, if you look at Dubai's growth, obviously -- so first of all, if we're looking -- we have a plan which takes us to 2033, right? So it's a bit more than 5 years out. And that plan has been developed based on -- it was based on doubling the size of Dubai. And if you look at the growth today, we're definitely way on track. We're 2 years into the plan. It was a 10-year plan. We're very much on track. We're ahead on many metrics. I think more people moved here than we expected in the 2 years, talent I'm talking about. Not sure because I always tell my team, it's not necessarily everything we're getting right. I think maybe some other geographies in those hundreds of cities that Stephen mentioned that maybe making some decisions which are not necessarily conducive to cultivating talent in their own cities. So they come here instead, which has been fine.

Without naming names.

Without naming names, not chat of house. But I think it's quite obvious. But the interesting thing is that what we've noticed in that time period is that one thing that's come out of COVID is the world has become smaller. People have become more mobile. Talent has become more mobile. And so Dubai is really, firstly, doubling down on all the areas it's like already very strong. Obviously, logistics, financial sector, technology, manufacturing, loads of these areas. But then what we're also doing is we're also really spending a lot of time on the areas that are new. And of late, if you look at the last 2 years, we've done a lot in the deep tech space. And if you look now, we've become one of the fastest-growing places in AI. I think if you look on LinkedIn, it's obviously like in terms of talent moving here for that, blockchain, we have the largest [ first asset regulator ] in the world, more regulated entities than anywhere else in the world. So even the new sectors that we've started to delve into, we've seen a very good response. It's a portfolio. So not everything is going to go perfectly. When it comes to the Exhibition business, this has been in Dubai for a long time. People don't realize a lot of these shows that we're talking about today are over 40 years old. And so the investment that's going into the infrastructure purely for the exhibition space, $3 billion to $4 billion minimum is going in the next 3 to 4 years, just in creating more space and the amenities around it, backed up by the hotel rooms, backed up by the airlines. We see this more than doubling in the next 5 years, the actual core business of the exhibition space. And so with those type of growth rates, it gives a lot of opportunity. And just swinging back to this partnership, we do see -- because there's very, very clear alignment on opportunities and growth and also the ability to also bring in more IP from the wider group is very, very important to us. And so we do see a fantastic opportunity in that area.

So just to follow up on that. So Stephen, a lot of these franchises have been around for 20 years or long periods and they built over time. If you look at this doubling over the next few years for the business, is that mainly continuing to expand existing franchises? Or is this bringing in new franchises that you can really build from scratch? Can you give a sense of the balance in there?

I'm just conscious that there may be people sitting in the room or possibly on the live stream who are taking your words literally, doubling of the business in the next few years. Well, sorry, I can feel Richard getting itchy.

What was the comment you made?

Over the next 5 years, we're expecting the industry to double. Sorry. And the industry is quite wide, yes.

These are important nuances.

Important nuances. I'm here to ask the question...

I more than share Helal's ambition, but it's never good to get over your skis. The answer to your direct question is both or maybe all 3. I mean, definitely expansion from the brands that we've got and indeed the brands that the business inside Helal's Empire brings, definitely then syndicating or geolocating those brands into other markets in a way that's relevant to those markets with the advantage of you start with the customer base, you start with a database, you start with the premise, you start with the brand, but also bringing IP in sectors that are aligned with the industrial priorities of the location. And that is another area where I think Dubai has been ahead of the game. We see it happening in other countries, countries that are trying to put themselves firmly on the global economic map. They're turning to us and saying, right, we've identified these 6 or 7 sectors. Is there a brand or a trade show that you could use or we could jointly use. So I think all three of those are a way are part of the path to growth over the next 5, 10 years, underpinned by capacity. But capacity on its own isn't enough. I mean you need the capacity. But I mean, another way of maybe cutting into your question, and I think Helal and I are completely aligned on this, and he's got deeper experience than me, is you have to ask yourself the question, what will the winning trade show of 5 or 10 years look like? And that will be a different thing, too. It will be much more thematic. It will be much more commercially orientated. It will be much more experiential. It will be much more distinctive. It may conceivably last for a bit longer. It may have more layers. It may be more multilayered. It may be more multi-location. So the actual product itself is going to change as well as there being new product. I don't know what you.

No, I think you're right. I mean I think it's -- what I think is most interesting is if you look today, I was mentioning the new halls are delivering by the year-end. The first show to take place in them will be Gulfood. Initially, those halls are 50% bigger. So we said to the Gulfood team, okay, you're going to move to the new halls, they're going to be 50% bigger. Obviously, ambitious team. Team came back 6 months later, said, you know what, we're happy with that. But we might just use the existing venue maybe for a conference or for something else, just said, okay, fine. I'm not doing anything with the existing venues still there for conference and everything else. And a few months past. And today, the team presented to me, they've filled up this venue and they filled up that venue. So you can't really plan because that wasn't the plan. The plan was to fill up venue. They filled up two venues. So that's one example of a very -- show that's been around, I guess, 40-odd, 30, 40 years. It's food sector. It's a typical trade show, nothing different. But if you take a new area that Dubai is growing massively, and I'm just taking this as a small example, Dubai has invested very heavily and is becoming a global leader in wellness and longevity. Today, we don't really have a show dedicated to that. We have shows around that, but not dedicated to it. If you ask the question in 5 years' time, will one of the leading shows be that. Now again, I know we're on camera, and I know Stephen doesn't come in. But I would say, if I have a portfolio of 10, I'm going to give a caveat answer here to make sure I get it right. If I have a portfolio of 10 bets like that, like a VC would, I'm sure that one of them and maybe this one would come out and it would be a wow mega show. And economically, both for a city, I mean, the interesting thing, which is maybe is not so relevant to the people in this room, but the correlation between the profitability of a show and the GDP impact on the city is very high because when you have a mega show and you have a must attend show and you have a leading show, it has a massive impact on the city because of investment, those companies actually investing, doing deals, people coming to it, and it also works fantastically on the bottom line of the owner of the show. And so we really see -- I see these emerging new areas and getting a massive opportunity. And leveraging the group's expertise in a lot of the different areas, I think that's really big.

And it changes the nature of the brand of Dubai. If you have a reputation for a big show in longevity, it's a whole different game. Are there any other themes that you would pick out as being particularly exciting looking forward?

You mean category themes. Sector themes.

Yes.

Well, look, I certainly agree on wellness and longevity. In fact, we brought an existing brand in that market -- in that area to Dubai last year for a trial, and it did 4x what we predicted in our own plans. Still small, but that doesn't mean it couldn't do another 4x in the time period that Helal is talking about. So I definitely agree with that. I mean, aviation is a big market. I mean, I've stolen it but to preconfigure, there's a fantastic quote from His Highness on one of the stands, which is we're not building the largest airport, we're building the aviation capital of the world. And I mean, the Dubai Air Show in the time that I've been coming to Dubai, which is 20-odd years now, the Dubai Air Show has gone from being one of the air shows. I think it would be fair to say then to being The Air Show. We don't take a huge amount of credit for that. Doug and his team before us, but I think we've taken that ball and developed it further. But more broadly, the aviation sector is one where I think Dubai will become absolutely one of, if not the leading locations. So that's a big theme area. Food, definitely. I mean, Gulfood is a powerhouse show, but there are many other aspects to the food supply chain, packaging, design, ingredients, technology. So I think you can also -- you can -- it can already be an existing theme and then you can expand what you do with the theme. So new things, further expansion in things where there is already a leadership position and then new aspects of existing things. There's a lot to play for.

And just you mentioned globalization. I mean, to what extent are there really significant opportunities for these big franchises to go from sort of annual gatherings in a big form in one place to making people want to go another time during the year to another geography and to actually expand some of these franchises in that meaningful way? Or is it sort of -- are shows kind of tied to a place? Or are there things that are -- people want to go multiple times in different places?

You go first...

I don't think it's quite as simple as either/or. I think you will get these mega shows and they are around the world. They're not necessarily all in Dubai or whatever, you have -- and they build up over time. And a certain extent of luck, I guess, and a certain extent of the team that's on them think more than the square meter, they think about all the other things that Stephen mentioned of the events of the future. However, what's abundantly clear is that any other major hub in the world or any other growth market in the world that has that on the agenda, has that particular topic on the agenda. There is an opportunity to create a very meaningful event. Now the reason why I use the word event is because the design of the event will be different. The objectives of the event will be different. The ROI that people are looking for is different. And so if you're in an emerging market, that is looking to do a -- looking at a new sector. It will be all about attracting, for example, FDI. It will be about capacity building. It will be about bringing that particular region to the show for those reasons. If it's a more mature market, it's often about how do you build the scale quickly. But we've seen whether it's Singapore or whether it's Kenya, whether it's Morocco or even Europe, there's definitely room to reinvent how people interact together with that -- with the topic because as long as they're getting a very good ROI, the show works really well.

Do you want to add anything to that? So just on the deal itself, just because I'm aware that a lot of people are going to maybe want a little bit more detail on this. You've got the venues business, which is obviously expanding capacity dramatically. How does the relationship work when it comes to that? Is there some sort of first dibs on the opportunities on this with the new venture? Or how do you think about that relationship?

So Dubai World Trade Center as a venue operator is completely separate to the events business even today. So the answer is no. The answer is arm's length relationship. But again, with that much capacity expansion, I think the there's plenty of opportunity. And I think that -- I don't think that there would be a situation whereby, let's say, there's some unique IP that the team wanted to bring in the future from one of the other geographies. It wouldn't -- they would obviously be more than welcome to, and that's part of the reason of doing the deal. Ultimately, what we look at is Dubai's calendar. What is good for Dubai's calendar is good for business. And as long as the counterparty is going to do well as well, then that's fine. It's got to be a win-win.

Stephen, can you talk about the cultures of the two companies? And obviously, you're bringing two big operators together with possibly slightly different perspectives. You're a very global company. It's very much focused on Dubai. Can you talk about how the cultures mesh and the sort of shared philosophy around how you do business?

Well, I can give you my view. I mean we haven't got to that point of the integration process yet. But I mean, let's start with what do we have in common. We're both running businesses in Dubai in the region. We're both doing some version of the same thing. We both have portfolios that are weighted to larger shows rather than small shows. I would say we are now both, although it's a bit later, I think, for your team. We are now both taking brands actively into multiple markets. And we've both been here for a long time. So there's quite a lot of overlap. I mean if I compare it to other combinations we've done in other parts of the world, there's a lot more that's similar than worryingly different. But is there some difference? For sure. But that's kind of okay. And to one of the points I made earlier, one of the things that we've definitely learned and I've certainly learned in the last 10, 12, 13 years is you have to have a similar set of values and then a lot of freedom to be different. And that's easy to say and hard to do. And if you get that right, then I think you end up with a high degree of ownership in a market, in a location. You have serious executives and teams who feel like it's their brand, their business in a real sense because it is. And in many of our businesses because it actually is, still they have either a slice of equity or they have some sense of ownership. But everybody agrees there's value in being part of the Informa franchise because it brings things that would be harder to do on a stand-alone basis in a single country or in a single brand. If you get that balance right, you can live with difference as long as it's not conflictual difference, right? That's how we think about it.

Yes. I think -- I mean, I would add a couple of things. So first of all, is this joint venture partnership, I look at it a little bit analytically. First of all, we don't have any crossover because this is a part of the biotracer to business being carved out. So like there's no major finance functions and other things that need to merge. It's teams running shows. If you look at our team today, and you look at, for example, the team running the food portfolio and the team running the technology portfolio, they have very little in common, right? The food portfolio specialists on food, the traditional trade shows. The other guys will tell you more about AI than most AI analysts, right, because of what they do in their area. And obviously, we don't have a crossover in sectors between the two entities. We don't have two teams running technology shows that are going to be merged together.

So this is not a cost-cutting opportunity?

It's not a cost-cutting opportunity. It's not in the model, but hopefully, the team are watching it. But -- so the point is that when we talk to the team about it, the tech team is super excited that they're going to now sit next to a healthcare team because they know that health tech is a big area for them. And so I see it very positively in that way. The other thing is like corporate culture and stuff, of course, there's always going to be and Stephen has a lot of experience with doing acquisitions and mergers. But I think just from a technical perspective, it's not your typical thing where you're saying, right, there's two exhibition companies coming together, 30% are going to have the same job. We don't have -- we have 0%. It's very different.

And the franchises are run quite separately.

In generally, in exhibition business, they are. And both of them have gone into these markets. And you see one team has done really well in Morocco, another team has done really well in Egypt. And then you can all -- they all want to -- the nature of what Stephen is saying is they feel they own the business. They're very results orientated. It's a very entrepreneurial type of people. And so as long as that works for them, then it's...

So you're going to try and keep that culture of that entrepreneurialism within the franchises and keep them separate to do that thing?

There was nothing about -- I mean, just to be clear, there's not -- I don't think at any point in any meeting I've been in, we've had a discussion about where can we save money. I mean this is solely focused on expansion, either expansion in Dubai, either expansion because of capacity expansion because of importing new IP or segmenting an existing sector or expansion internationally in markets where there is opportunity. I mean, might there be some scale efficiencies in procurement or relationships with contractors? For sure, over time, but it's not the driving reason.

I know we wanted to do some Q&A and allow folks in the audience. But before I say -- before I leave, do we have a name yet? Is it Informa International, OneCo? What are we referring to?

We don't have a name. It's a bit like having a child. I don't know if you ever find this issue, we did. A lot of names. A lot of names.

We had to name our kid before we left the hospital in America. So we were like -- there was no messing around.

Where did you go?

What do you mean which name? Well, it's a long story. We ended up with Tess. But it was around...

I can tell you it won't be called Tessco.

I think someone was taking that.

No, I was just saying like I want to excuse myself, I'm not looking at everyone because the light is extremely bright. Stephen has got these reflective glasses. So if you ask questions and I don't look at you, it's not me being rude.

Does anybody want -- we've got 7 or 8 minutes. Does anyone have a question they'd like to ask from the audience? Room for the hit here and then the lady behind.

Steve Liechti from Deutsche Bank. Can you just talk about timing of the transaction in terms of -- you went public on it some time ago and the target is towards the end of this year. What have you actually got to do to bring the two businesses together? Where is the execution risk in that on the timing? And just talk us through some of the actions there, please?

Do you want to go first? Do you want me to go first? Okay. We're still on the end of the year or the beginning of the next year time line. The -- for a whole host of reasons, I think our thinking is we'll either get it done before we get into Gulfoods first outing in the new venue and indeed the old venue. And then relatively shortly after that, we take one of our big brands, which is our health care brand, WHX to the new venue or we'll do it on the other side. So either we'll get it done before or get it done shortly thereafter, so that it doesn't get in the way of the success of both of those.

And just to follow up, the -- when we saw the TechTarget transaction, I think the accounting sort of was a lot more complicated and fragmented than expected. I mean any views there in terms of technical issues in terms of the merger transaction?

Thanks for bringing that up, Steve. I mean we're only half an hour into the event. But it's nice that you made the trip. We don't think so is the answer. I mean I don't want to tempt fate having tempted it last time and it not being terribly kind to us. But there are a lot of differences. Number one, the accounting conventions here are the same as they are in the United Kingdom. We're both working on IFRS accounting, whereas -- so we don't have the pleasure in Commerce of reverting into a SOC structure. We're also slightly, as I replied to Thorold, we're taking two businesses that do pretty much exactly the same thing in broadly the same ways. So the way in which we revenue recognize account, the way in which we categorize direct costs, indirect costs, they're pretty similar. So I don't think the operational financial architecture of the combination is going to be anywhere near as testing as we found the Informa TechTarget experience. He said with at least two fingers crossed.

The lady at the back. Sorry, apologies, I didn't see you. If you go next. Sorry.

[indiscernible] from Bernstein. So it's quite clear how you see the exhibition space as a key part of Dubai, but why did you choose to partner with Informa rather than another global player or actually put your money into local exhibition players because there are quite a few that are around. And my second one is also for you. I think you suggested that you were taking share in Dubai from other geographies. Where do you actually see that money coming from mostly?

So let me answer the first question. I think that's quite a simple answer because what I had mentioned earlier, if I take a step back from Dubai World Trade Center an entity, Dubai World Trade Center as an entity is owned by Investment Corporation of Dubai, similar to Emirates Airline and others, which is the sovereign wealth fund of Dubai. Obviously, we look to first lens was very financial to make sure that we could grow faster and we could do better than we could do by ourselves or with other targets that we had, and we did have other options, and it turned out to be the best. The other thing is, obviously, spending time with Stephen and obviously, the team, we realized that there's a sort of direct fit in terms of not just the team's culture, but the ambitions, the geographies we're in, and there's no crossover. So it just looked like it would be a lot easier, to be frank. I mean, I think Stephen, I don't know his past through, but he gave a very sort of answer. I mean, for me, it is very straightforward compared to a lot of the other stuff we're doing. So I felt very confident in that. So I think that's basically -- it's not that exciting reason, but it's the simple reason. When it comes to taking market share, especially in the exhibition business, it's on a portfolio-by-portfolio because if you just look at the top 5 shows in the world and you look at the growth rate of the show here, like if we're in the top 3 and you look at the growth rate in the shows here, you can say, are we growing faster or not? Are we taking a larger part of the global geography or not? So you take Gulfood, we are growing faster than Anuga or [ Sialo ] . And so we're taking -- but each one will be different. It wouldn't be just from one country. It would be show related. So I hope that answers your question. It's very show related.

Do you want to ask a question here? Yes, at the front.

It's Nick Dempsey from Barclays. I've got two, please. So just on the increased exhibition space that's coming on stream in Dubai, are there particular current Informa shows that will definitely benefit from that in 2026? Or will it initially be the Dubai World Trade Center shows and then eventually Informa shows? And then second one, when you did the Saudi transaction, you were focused on a minimum margin for newly launched shows to prevent the kind of dilution too much on your margin. Is there something being considered here for new shows?

I mean the next show, I think I'm correct in saying that the next show after Gulfood and the new venue is ours, isn't it? -- is WHX. So that will be the next one off the next taxi off the rank, so to speak, Nick. Did we say that there was a minimum margin on new shows in Saudi? I don't think we -- did we say that? Richard, did you say that?

Overall, there was...

Yes, yes, that's better. That's what I thought. It's just the construction of your question. I didn't recognize, sorry, Nick. I mean, Saudi was a totally different market for us. I mean it's a totally different market in lots of ways. But we were establishing a business from scratch effectively. In fact, we could argue, and I think I wouldn't be misrepresenting, I can't see in the light where Annabelle is, we were establishing an industry in part from scratch. I mean there were some incidental trade shows, but nothing. At that point, Saudi was nowhere near as far down the line as Dubai is in being a global center. It's making significant strides, and we're making some of those strides with them. So I think the context of that comment was to get into that market, we accepted that there would be a dilution to the margin. We had some view about what the kind of a minimum margin would work for us, which would be different from elsewhere in the world, and then we play catch-up. But it didn't specifically relate to new shows. It was really our approach to the business model. Does that answer your question, Nick?

We are out of time. Should we do more questions or we should call it a day. Great. Thank you both very much indeed.

Thanks a lot for having me.

Thanks very much -- thanks for doing that. I keep that on sorry. What happens? Right. Anyone need to come for break? No, good. Right. We'll keep going. Do I go back or forward?

Forward? No, I don't think it is actually. It is fantastic.

Right. Okay. Well, this is an opportunity for me just to repeat a welcome. I know a good number of you have traveled. A bit of a show of hands up for how many people this is their first time in Dubai. That's a good few. Good few. Well, listen, I hope you get a lot out of it. It's a fantastic place. I was at the air show earlier this morning, which is why I was not here for the sort of milling around beforehand because we opened the air show this morning, you'll get to see it tomorrow for those who are going. Doug can keep me honest because he knows more about the air show than I do. But I would say it really has stepped up. It's a fantastic show. One of the privileges of my job is you get to see a lot of shows around the world in many places, and it really has all the features you would want in a trade show. And I took this photograph on my little iPhone on one of the stands from His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid, which says, we're not building -- it's the stand if you go to tomorrow, which has got the 2-dimensional model of the new airport. And there were these three people in front of me as I was trying to take this picture, I want to take a picture of the actual model. And I didn't want to say get out of the way because we weren't taking a picture, but my body language was communicating, could you get it? So they turn around to say, and I said, if you wouldn't mind I'm trying to take a picture. And as soon as they heard my accent, they said, I reckon this will be here before we've even got another runway. And then -- so we had a bit of a chat about the difference between airport development in, if you might call the legacy world and airport development in a place that's got more forward-looking opportunities. I just thought this was a fantastic example of a very, very simple vision statement. We're not building the largest airport in the world. We're building the aviation capital of the world. I mean it's such a simple statement of intent, of forward intent. And as I said in the session with Helal, I've been coming to and from this country and city for over 20 years now. And over that period, the thing that has been consistent is the focus on what's coming next, not what's come before, what's coming next. And I think you got a very clear sense of that in Helal's answer to how it relates to the exhibition business and the trade show business. And that, more than anything, is what led me to knock on his door and say, listen, as well as being a big customer, why don't we become partners? We could do something much better together than we can do individually. Anyway, just to go back to go forward because my job here is to do a bit of a scene set is just to talk about where we are as a company, where we're going and then to hand it over to the other presenters. This has been a theme for us for a very, very long time, growth. And the reason why is because back in the day, whilst there was nothing spectacularly wrong with Informa, we were hovering back in 2012, 2013 at or around that place for those of you who are familiar with British companies is a place that can be quite testing. We were turning over around GBP 1 billion a year. We were making around GBP 200-or-so millions of profit. We were paying 50% of our profit in dividends. We had some debt interest, a bit more debt interest than we wanted. We had just about enough money to buy a couple of bolt-ons that would just about keep us flat or marginally growing year-on-year. Cycle 1, cycle 2, cycle 3, cycle 4. Our equity had no real value, and therefore, it was very, very hard to use our equity currency to grow the company. And by definition, at that size, your cash flows are relatively de minimis. So the question for us was, was there a way in which we could become a scale player? And if we could become a scale player, where should we choose to play? That's kind of the question that I was posed or I was posing when I took over as Chief Executive back in the middle of 2013. The company at that time was a mixture of different assets. And actually, our trade show business was our smallest business if it had been a stand-alone business, which it was not. It was integrated into many other things. Our biggest business by some margin was the Taylor & Francis business, which Penny and the team will talk about later. Our next biggest business was our conference business. But whilst many of you, I'm sure, in the questions will want again to get into the -- is AI going to disintermediate your business discussion. Back then, what was definitely clear was that the Internet was definitely going to disintermediate the spot conference business. Because if you're doing 12,000 to 15,000 spot conferences a year where you're getting 50 people in the room and charging them GBP 100 to hear the latest insight on a subject, that wasn't going to survive the full onslaught of full-scale connectivity. So the conference business clearly could not be our future. And whilst we were in the data business largely through the acquisition of Data Monitor, which had been less than our finest hour as a company and a couple of other things, we were a small player. And it was very, very clear. If you wanted to be in a subscription data business, you needed a bigger balance sheet than we were ever going to have. So the conclusion we came to was really the answer lay in the trade show business. That's where we were going to get growth. So we had to kind of shift the company from here to where we are on the other side of this chart. And for a while, it went sort of reasonably well. And then, of course, we had this existential moment when we were wondering whether or not that was such a smart idea when Richard, Gareth and I were wondering around trying to persuade people to lend us money because we believed that face-to-face events were going to come back where 90% of the people we met said, it's never going to happen. Everyone's going virtual. I'm going to put my money into hopping and face-to-face events and global travel are going to disappear. Actually, what happened was we discovered that if you have enforced global prohibition on your core product, what you discover on the other side of it is that your customers have to make an active decision of whether they want it because they've been denied it. And what we discovered was that our customers really did want it. And so we made probably the key pivot decision at this end of this time line, which was to sell at that point our intelligence businesses. Much better to sell it here because we raised GBP 2.5 billion. Whereas back here when everyone told me to sell it, we did a valuation and we'd have got just over GBP 300 million for our intelligence businesses. So it gave us a lot more money. Now we spent a bit of money, about GBP 35 million to turn those into meaningful businesses, but you take that trade every day. That then allowed us to give GBP 1 billion back to shareholders, which we borrowed during COVID to survive, and it allowed us to then recycle that capital before the world had fully adjusted to the reality that face-to-face was going to be a powerhouse business to be in. And that allowed us to acquire the Tarsus business, Doug's business, the HIMSS business, Winsight and the Ascential business. And since then, we've really been very focused on doubling down on the performance of that business and simultaneously looking at what we need to do similarly in the academic business. This is what it's done for the company in terms of growth, cash flow growth and revenue growth. And this is what it's also done in terms of geography. This is the group by revenue. Now the B2B markets business is nearly 83% of the business. And this business this year is going to grow at around 9%. This is it by geography. North America is still the biggest. But if you look at it by -- in the B2B business, EMEA, and this is pre the OneCo combination. Let's call it, Tess. The EMEA business is getting bigger and the growth rates in that part of the world are considerably greater. So a significant change in revenue mix, a significant change in geographic mix. And this, more than anything, I think, is the big change. The U.K., where we're listed, where we're domiciled and where we still employ a lot of people, I think just over 3,000 people, it isn't the place where the company makes its money. And it's increasingly not where the place where the company looks out of the world to say, where is the future of the company going to be. To go back to the what's our plan for the next 5 to 10 years, we're unlikely to find the answer looking out from London. This then in the deck, for those who are interested, gives you a bit more breakdown on our live events revenue by headcount and then by sector. And then this is how we operate the business. As everyone knows, we've got the three businesses, the two B2B digital businesses and the academic business. We're not going to talk much about TechTarget today. TechTarget has not done in year 1 what we wanted it to do, and our plan is for it to begin to do that in year 2. Today, that's pretty much all I'm going to say about TechTarget, as Steve hopefully teed up earlier, Thanks, Steve. This turned out to be slightly trickier than we thought on combination, and we faced a little bit of a market headwind in year 1. The internal plumbing issues, we've by and large, resolved. So now we're just focused on how do we take share in that market. So our plan is to get that business back into growth. Relatively, it's a small contributor to earnings, but hopefully, by '26 and '27, it will start being a bigger contributor to earnings. This business, I'm going to come on and talk about a bit more, but just to talk about the academic business, Back here, I would say, and Alex Robinson, who was around at the time, who will be speaking later, can keep me honest. I would say Taylor & Francis back in 2013 or when I joined the Board in 2010, it was a straight down the fairway traditional academic publisher for those of you who followed the company for a long time. The [indiscernible] it was essentially two businesses, a journals business, 100% pay to read and in the journals business, there was no open business in there at all. Geographically, we had no presence at all in Asia outside of what you might call historically adjacent U.K. markets like Singapore and Australia and to a degree, New Zealand. The books business was 90%, 95% of physical books business. e-books existed as a product, the manufacturing process was electronic, but the business was a physical book. We had warehouses. We did delivery. We had year-end stocking orders and the rush to get it out the physical warehouse at the end of the year. It was a very, very different business to what it is today. Over the period, this business has changed. Open, we've embraced, I think, it took us a bit of time, but we got there in the end. It's now 20% plus of the business, both Open Access and Open Research. The reference business is now majority nonphysical and only going in one direction. We've changed the way that business goes to market. It's much less of an intermediated business, much more of a direct-to-customer business. But the big question, which is what Penny has joined us to try and lead is how do we take that change and make it more of a knowledge platform business and get it into what we inside in Informa call a 5% club, which is the base level of performance we've set for businesses inside the group. Penny, Alex and Ashok will come back and talk about that later. But that's really the context in which we think about the academic business. On AI, we've embraced AI. We took a pretty early decision that AI was coming. It was coming at a click. So why don't we spend a bit of money and try and embrace it. We've built modularly our own support agent inside our own company called Elysia. We trailed it a bit with the annual report. So some of you may have played around with it, if you spent some time looking at our annual report. We did that because it allows us to put all of our own data inside Elysia, which obviously we wouldn't choose to put on ChatGPT or another LLM. And it's allowing us to slowly but surely in a drumbeat of delivery, this is a program that Alex is running, to improve capability inside the business. The capability is designed to free up time to focus on quality, product distinction and speed to market and geographic expansion. We're not looking to take cost out particularly. We're looking to reallocate time to more productive activity, and we are finding that to be a significant advantage in both of our businesses. Where does that lead us financially? This is our basic thesis on a going-forward basis for the company. If you go back to that time line, we're 4, 5 years outside of COVID. So where are we? This is kind of where we see the company coming to the end of 2025. We see no reason why we can't, over the period, '26, '27, '28, be a 5%-plus baseline growth business compounding over that period. With the B2B business being a 6%-plus compound grower as a minimum; the academic business, 3% to 4% is a minimum with an ambition to get to 5%, so therefore, it's net neutral on the group ambition; and similarly with Informa TechTarget. You flow that through what that then means that our profits would then grow a bit of a pace ahead of our revenues. So that would flow through to our earnings. We're seeing our margin tick up. This year will be just over 28%. If you remember in the depths of COVID, we dropped down to 20%, and our intention is to get our margins back up to 30%. And we've set ourselves a target of converting 90%-plus of our cash -- operating cash flow into operating profit. If you look at that over the bottom, for those of you at the back of the room who couldn't see it, if you take 3 years of compounding growth at those levels, that's about GBP 630 million of additional revenue. And if that GBP 630 million of additional revenue drops through at, say, 40%, you might say, why not 50%? I might argue that it could be 30%, but say at 40%, then you're creating real organic value out of the engine that we have bought, built and developed over the period. And that's where we are positioning ourselves for compounding financial returns over the period. Why should you believe that's possible? Well, let's, as Helal said, step out of the B2B events business. And let's think about what sector is the B2B events business in? And we would say the events business is in this sector. It's in the market for live activity. What are people willing to pay in order to get access to a live event rather than a digitized virtual or alternative solution. You see in sports, you see in music, you see in theater, you see in a range of areas. The increasing premium value that's attached to a live product as long as that live product has some level of unique distinction and quality that isn't replicable in an easier manner. What about the actual market for B2B live events? Well, fundamentally, it's structurally a growth market for a whole variety of reasons. In round numbers, the total addressable market is not a super big market, but it's big enough, it's GBP 30 billion. It's absolutely, as we discussed in that Q&A, a global industry, but it's 100% a global industry with national delivery. You have to be able to take your brands and then deliver them in a relevant way in the market in which you work. It's very fragmented. It's still the case today that half the market is owned by trade associations, particularly in China and North America. About 10% of the market is businesses like Helal's events business, so it's events that are owned by venue operators. So that means that only 40% of that market is actually owned by people like us, and you can do the math on what that means our market share is. But the good thing is that means our market share is actually relatively small. So we have significant runway ahead in the coming years. And then you've got some structural growth drivers, and I'll pick out 2 of these. The first, we absolutely, I think, got a case study there from Helal, is countries that are using meetings, incentives, conferences and exhibitions as an economic strategy for developing market access and economic development in country [ a, b or c ]. And this, to be honest, if I went back to my time line back in 2013, '14, '15, nobody was opening their door for me to have a cup of coffee with them to have a chat about this. I mean most people didn't even know who I was or who we were. In the last 4 or 5 years since COVID, there's almost nowhere now we can't go and have that discussion: a, because we're the biggest player in the market; and b, because many other countries have come to the market and recognize that it is a significant driver of an economic multiplier, which is considerably more valuable than the return to the event operator. So if they can find a counterparty that is an event operator that can operate at global scale, that's a very easy conversation to conduct on a bilateral basis. And the second is a belief statement that there is a rising value in face-to-face. There may well be less of it, but if you own the primary brand in it, it's very, very valuable. And those 2 things together are really part of what's driving a lot of our growth. I'll skip this. It's in the chart. This is where we are today. So back in 2015, GBP 500 million; back in 2013, just sub GBP 100 million. This year, we'll be just north of GBP 3 billion. This is where we are ranked to the next biggest player, the next biggest player. When I first started looking at this, Helal was running a bigger business than I was running when I first met him for a cup of coffee by some margin. We've been an acquirer, make no bones about that. I didn't turn up in 2014, '15, '16 and tell the market, I'm going to acquire lots of companies because if you do that on day 1, most of them they run for the hills. We did say we were going to build or buy a leadership position in the events market. We did say that for the first 2 years. And then we bought Hanley Wood. And then everyone said to us, why are you doing that? We said, we have spent the last 2 years saying we're going to build or buy a leadership position in the events market. Anyway, from Hanley Wood, we then went on, we then went on, we then went on. I think the next period, we don't need to be an acquisition vehicle, but we definitely can continue to be a consolidating vehicle. We just need to be much more forensic about where we choose to consolidate, because now we don't need to buy, we might just choose to in certain sectors or in certain geographies. But that's essentially the scale of the business. That then is how it breaks down by events, by headcount and by revenue. And this -- I mean, this is a sort of slightly rainbow colored chart. But I often say to people, a bit like the brands and the businesses that we have bought, the most interesting thing about this for me, at least, isn't the sectors we're in. It's the sectors we're not in. Because one of the advantages of building a business largely from scratch is you can choose what, where you're going to play. You can also choose where you're not going to play. So by and large, we've tried to stay out of -- not entirely, but we've tried to stay out of retail-facing markets. We've tried to stay out of low-margin end markets. We've tried to stay out of markets that have high and complex government intervention and regulation because they tend to be a bit more volatile. We've stayed out of energy, we stayed out of extraction industries. So we've made some conscious choices about where we will build our business because we think that lowers the volatility in the performance of that business. Now these are our biggest franchises. This rather speaks to the question that somebody asked in the Q&A to Helal and myself, which is, you can take a brand. There's a mothership inside that GBP 220 million, but there are 9 other versions of CPHI that happen elsewhere or one that might be more familiar to you, SuperReturn. There's a mothership in SuperReturn in Berlin, which I think we've put in the goody bag, a VIP freebie ticket for those of you who want to come to SuperReturn in Berlin in 2026, which is a fabulous event. But there are 23 other SuperReturns. So we really have begun the process of industrially syndicating the brands where we think there is value in doing it and using our geographic position to drive growth and, as you can see, drive revenue. If you do what I do for living, this is just a thing of beauty. These are our top 50 brands. We don't disclose individual brands by revenue, but there's GBP 1.5 billion of revenue here. They range from $50 million, sorry for the switch, but most of these brands report in dollars. They range from $15 million up to $140 million. We have 2 brands on their own that make more revenue as a single brand than our entire trade show business did 11 years ago. If you could -- if we stood this business up, I don't know what this says about either our IRR capability or how markets price things. But if you stood these 50 brands up as a stand-alone business and priced it to our valuation today, you get the other half of our B2B business for free, you get Taylor & Francis for free and you get Informa TechTarget for free. Because these 50 brands basically match our market value as of last night when the markets closed. There is not a brand portfolio like this anywhere in the world. And this is what is allowing us to go around the world and have conversations in different geographies about what would you like to do to expand your market? Which sectors are you most interested in? Where do you see economic growth? What's your opportunity for further expansion? How much more are you making available for capacity in the years to come? And how can we work with you as a partner? We run our business this way now. Patrick will speak later on the stage, runs Informa Markets, our transaction-led business. Andy runs Informa Connect, which is our more content-led business. And Matthieu runs our newest business, if you like, Informa Festivals, our experience-led business. These are -- this is what I would call the poison of PowerPoint rather than the clarity of PowerPoint because it's not as neat as this. There are overlaps. We've got experience-led brands in here, and we've got transaction-led brands in there and vice versa. But in the main, there is reason behind our organization and our approach to it. But what I would say is that today, in round numbers, GBP 2 billion of our revenue is here and about another GBP 1.5 billion is here. And the market is going this way. So to Helal's point about what is our product going to be in 5 to 7 years? It's going to be more distinctive, more experiential, more content-led, more unique, more contributing, more of a market participant than merely just a physical place where buyers can meet sellers. There will still be some shows, which are buyers and sellers for sure. In my professional lifetime, I'm sure that's true. But the trend line is only going in that direction. What does that, therefore, mean in what we can do with growth because the more the trend line goes in that direction, the easier it is for us to do this, the easier it is for us to price for value rather than for space. The easier it is for us to ensure that in each sector of participant in a sector or in a show, you maximize your market penetration rather than just fill up the hall. The easier it is for us to take our brands and move them into multiple geographies. The easier it is for us to fill up the capacity that is coming into the market in multiple places. The easier it is for us to take attendee value. Today, we have $500 million of attendee revenue in our model, $500 million. The vast majority of that is in Andy's business and then in Matthieu's business. The smallest amount actually is in Informa Markets because traditionally in trade shows, you didn't charge attendees, you charged exhibitors. But actually, if you're building a product that has real multidimensional value, why would you not use attendee pricing as a means of filtering your bias? Why would you not use attendee pricing as a means of demonstrating value? Why would you not use attendee pricing as a way of driving your revenue? And then finally, the richer the event, the more distinctive the event, the more multilayered the event, the easier it is to sell other products and services. And as Richard said at the opening, we've showcased a couple of those in the product demos, Lead Insights as an example, where you can offer other products and services. Even in this business here, we're in this business. People will pay $10 a lead, $50 a lead, $150 a lead, sometimes $300 a lead for a fully qualified warm sales lead. So that's a market with a lot of pricing spread in it. So if you can be in a position to provide the premium product to a premium attendee, in a premium location, in a market which has put a premium on that category, where you really have got the premium players in that market, your ability to price for value is really very attractive. And those are the building blocks for our growth strategy over the next 3 to 4 years. The next 3 slides just take you through the components of how do you price for value. What are the inputs, inflation, market growth, event position, maturity and what that then allows us to do in the way in which we component price. And I'd encourage you when Penny is on the stage with Patrick and Matthieu and Andy to throw questions at this because this has become a really interesting part of our business. Back 10, 12 years ago, we negotiated with a venue owner. We got the hall. We paid a gross price. We worked out how much of the net space we could use and we sold the space. That was the model. Nothing wrong with that model, but it's definitely changing. This is what we mean by market penetration. And this is really continuously looking at new customer segments as you develop in a market and you see new market opportunities coming along. And we've got quite a good few of them in our -- in the markets in which we operate. Energy in the last few years, no new news. Batteries has become a big part of the business. But 5 years ago, it wasn't. So okay, is there an opportunity for a Battery Show? AI. Well, what's the big -- what backs up AI? Well, data centers. Well, 4, 5 years ago, we didn't have a big data center. We didn't have a big data show. Now we've got the biggest data center show in the U.S. In aviation, well, everyone knows about getting on a plane and going to Dubai, but what about space? Well, actually, space is the new frontier in aviation transport. So we are developing a whole portfolio of space tech experts, and so you go on. So the other thing about markets is they change. They change and they metamorphize over time. And this allows you to follow your market and then be able to bring new products to market and get the network effects that come from being the scale player. I would say this is one of the things I would give as a B+, possibly even an A- given I'm in public as colleagues who are in the room will know, I'd probably give us a C- in an internal meeting because it's always better to be dissatisfied internally. But we've got really good at doing this. Taking our brands, identifying the right geographical market, getting there early, putting people in that market, giving them resource and then building a market position. And if you do that really well, you're building long-term annuity values, which if you do it well and you build a product that's sustainable, it then makes it very, very difficult for other people to come in and challenge your market position. And you see that in the way in which this part of the market has shrunk and the rest of the market has grown for us. And it's been a big part of the engine of our growth in the last 5 or 6 years. We touched on this on the stage. I mean, I don't have much more to add. I think the rationale for this combination makes eminent sense. We have a long-standing partnership. We know each other well. There is no revenue leakage. There is no overlap. There is no revenue competition. There's a lot of geographic opportunity in both portfolios, and that's before you get to the inbound opportunity in Dubai as more capacity comes on. And it will give us alongside our business in Saudi, it will give us a market leadership position in this part of the world, which really is the engine for growth. As part of that, we are including our business in Turkey and our business in India. I'm not going to steal Yogesh and Atilla's thunder because both of them have been building our businesses here. Both of these are scale and growth markets. We definitely are the leading player in both markets. There's capacity coming into both markets, and there's a real opportunity for us to do more. In KSA, similarly, we've pretty much gone from a standing start. We weren't really in Saudi Arabia, bar a fly-in, fly out, a couple of small shows, the other side of COVID, since then, we've built a business. We've now got over 300 colleagues there. There are 2 major venues in Riyadh. We've got 20 brands in the portfolio for next year at 1 million attendees and the economic impact is remarkable. Today, as well as opening the Dubai Airshow, we opened Cityscape Global in Riyadh. That will be the largest commercial real estate show in the world this week. And previously, that was a brand that we used to run in other markets. The team there are doing an absolutely outstanding job, and there's further runway ahead there as well. On capacity and supply, this is one of the other features of the market. Sometimes you can worry about new capacity coming to a market. Does it lower the price? Is there the demand? We believe there is. And then you get into a kind of running competition. Now we can have a bit of a debate about -- I mean, I would say, for example, why is my hometown not on here? Why does [ Paris? ] Why does never appear on this map. But what are the key features of a global gateway city? Well, you've got to have a world-class B2B events venue for us to look at it. And that isn't just absolute size. That's the nature of the venue, how modular is it, how accessible is it? Can you get in, can you get out? What's the technology capability inside the venue. It's not just the space equation, well obviously, space matters. As Helal touched on, airport capacity and connections. One of the things I found in the last year, basing myself out of here, the 6-, 7-hour question, you can get anywhere in the world from here. It's fantastically well connected. And as well as the capacity, you've also got to have world-class airlines so that you're not spending 20% of your time hanging out in a departure lounge. You need scale and range of hotel capacity. This is a conversation I and my other colleagues in the events business often have now with mayors and governors of established legacy cities or more established cities, which is it's great to have 2 5-star hotels or 1 5-star hotel. But if you want to run an event with 200,000 attendees, you need very, very good 3-star, 4-star, 5-star hotels. So you've got to have range in capacity, not just luxury capacity. The city needs to work. That's transport infrastructure, distribution, parking, public transport and traffic management. And it really helps. It really helps if the city is run as a brand. Because the people who go, all of us, and I'm sure many people here in the room, when you turn to your husband or your wife or your partner or your dog or your children and say, well, what are you doing this week? And you say, I'm going to Dubai. And I suspect with a number of people that evoked a reaction, probably not -- that's pretty tough. And that's partly because it has a bit of a brand. It has a bit of an image, has a bit of a positioning. And the same is true with some of the second-tier cities you see coming up in North America that are really biting at the ankles of some of the traditional mainstream cities in North America. Same is true in China. Same is true in India. Same is true in South America. So city management and being competitive as a city brand is also quite relevant because industries and certainly particular industries like to be in a place where it's slightly happening in a way that's relevant to their industry. And so for us, the fact that the city market has become more competitive is actually a driver of growth for us because it means there is competitive supply. It's a big change. The Dubai venue expansion has been laid out. That's really significant. That will put Dubai, if you take once they get to the other side of the full expression of [ DEC ], I think I'm correct. I'm looking at Trixie and John. I think that will put Dubai sixth on the world city list in absolute capacity. That's pretty amazing, just in terms of absolute physical capacity. We're also using our scale to change the nature of our relationships with venues and cities to try and have more longer-term contracts where there's mutuality on both sides, predictability, support, pricing and also co-marketing and in some cases, other incentives. So there's a lot going on in the back end of our business where we're taking advantage of our scale and our market position. Attendee value I've talked about. This is how it racks at the moment. In Markets, it's about $110 million, tell me if I'm wrong here, Patrick, or in Connect, about $250 million, Festivals, about $130 million. The interesting question is what could that number be in 3 to 4 years? And what should it be once you layer on growth and once you layer on the type of growth that you're putting into the business? And what does it allow you to do in improving the quality of the audience for the customer? I'm not going to dwell on amplification because we're going to cover that later. And when you wrap that all up, that gets us to where our confidence in this 3-year '26, '27, '28 going into '29 plan. We feel confident in the market. We feel confident in our position in the market. So in simple terms, we think we're a good house in a good neighborhood. We think the growth drivers in that market are not unique to us, but we're maybe uniquely positioned to take advantage of them. We're getting much better at some of the levers of growth rather than just the execution performance of delivery, and that gives us further confidence. We have a high degree of confidence that over the period of the plan, the academic business can continue the path of change to get to a point whereby it's matching the base level growth rates in the group. And as I said, TechTarget, we will do what we set out to do, but we might just be a year or 18 months behind schedule for which apologies. Financially, that takes us to this picture, which on a 3- to 4-year basis, we think is a very attractive compounding financial framework and gives us a set of things that will require us to operate discipline in -- throughout that 3- to 4-year period. Am I allowed to take questions or do we go straight to -- go straight. Two questions afterwards quite right. I'm glad Richard is here. Penny, Patrick, Andy and Matthieu, if I could invite you to bring a chair and come to the stage. Thanks for listening.

So we've all heard today's theme is around compounding growth. And as we heard from Stephen, there are many different drivers of this growth. I'd love to hear from each of you what you're most excited about? Patrick, do you want to start?

Well, thank you. Well, on the theme of the day, I'm very excited about doing some more compounding as we go forward. I'm pleased with the performance in 2025, and that gives us momentum into 2026, which is very exciting. I think the opportunity has already been spoken about, to some extent, the opportunities for us to continue to compound through the volume growth and yield growth through our brands, through geographic expansion and through category expansion is something that's particularly exciting for Informa Markets. And also from a product perspective, the investments that we've made in IIRIS, our first-party data and the ability to build new products and services around data and using the investments coming through One Informa, I think that's going to be a really exciting future for us as well.

Amazing. Matthieu, would you like to go next?

Thanks, Penny. You've seen the framework, the growth framework. For me, the opportunity is to execute that growth framework in its entirety at pace and at scale. When you look at each of those growth levers across our brands, our categories, our markets, there's a significant material sort of price again each of them over the next 3 years. For me, specifically across Festivals, the 3 key ones, which we are actively working on doubling down on our #1 penetration, rigorously understanding our markets, our audiences, understanding our penetration or market share, if you want, and driving that further. For example, Money20/20, which I think a lot of you are familiar with, that's taking our penetration of U.S. banks from 20% to 30% over the next 3 years. In gaming, that's furthering our penetration of the gaming ecosystem by relaunching GDC as a Festival of Gaming in March 2026. Number two, geo, which we've touched on a little bit. We've already had a great example this year with the launch of Money20/20 in KSA, which was very successful. I've got the chance to work with a great portfolio of big brands with global relevance. So there's quite a bit we can do on geo expansion still, and we might come back to that. And thirdly, amplification. Our customers' needs in Festivals are constantly evolving. And so we have that opportunity to innovate and offer new products and services that continually differentiate the events. So for example, that's offering new inventory asset space, which is not in the venue, enabling our customers to create bespoke activation or experiences for their own clients, but it could be new meeting products, new lead gen products, new award products, new media products, et cetera. So the entirety of the framework is what I'm excited about for us in festivals is doubling down on penetration, geo and amplification.

Last, but not least, we're having a good year as well, Patrick, which is nice.

Collaboration, not...

Sorry, sorry, yes, of course. If you look at the amplification side, Connect, which is delegates and it has sponsors exhibitors, there's a lot of work around content in that space. And trying to create a better customer experience, wanting to become more festivalized over time, we've done really well. If you use NPS as a score, I think probably 80% to 90% of our events have increased their NPS score over the period of time, which gives us a lot of confidence. But if you think about -- I'm really excited on how we can evolve our content area through AI. Over the last couple of years, we've captured 29,000 videos at events on our streaming platform. But AI now will allow us to take content from every single event and turn it instantaneously into new content, whether it's podcast, whether it's event summaries, whether it's day summaries, which is added value for the attendee. We could probably charge them more for that individually or we can charge them more for the pricing or it's sponsored products. Super excited. We're testing all this at AI Summit coming up in New York. And that's a very, very exciting area for us. The other bit I can't not say about the -- because Helal talked about wellness and Stephen talked about data centers. We have an amazing data center portfolio where I think the opportunity for that is massive. Our AI portfolio is doing very well, and that still continues to be strong. Wellness, we've got 2 very strong brands in A4M and AMWC, and it was the AMWC launch just a month-or-so in Dubai, which was a massive success. So the whole wellness area, we think, is very, very exciting. And SuperReturn, our private capital brand, just carries on from strength to strength. So we expect to have an even better couple of years for SuperReturn as well.

It's really interesting because as you've all touched on similar thematics, you've actually given quite different answers. So you all run a B2B events divisions, which have lots of similarities, but also distinctions. It'd be lovely to hear from you sort of what are some of those distinctions. Patrick, do you want to start again?

Well, look, I mean, as Stephen has already highlighted and illustrated in some of the slides, we have fantastic brands, and we have a global reach and we have local delivery. I mean it's a fantastic place to start. And I think that's common across us. For Informa Markets in particular, creating events where buyers and sellers can meet to learn, to discover, but very importantly, to transact, and that's a particular focus of Informa Markets. And also, I'd say we have an enormous benefit in that next year's event is booked at this year's event. So we have great visibility of future revenues for this business, in particular.

Andy?

Yes. I think all of our events aspire to be Festivals, but we start on content. We focus on incredibly unique high-value content to attract amazing high-quality audiences. We spend a lot of time trying to make sure that's engaged and interacted through networking. But the thing that we have different, we have a lot of events. So SuperReturn, whether it's 24 or 27 events, we have the ability to try something out in January and polish it and improve it and try it again in May and try it in June and try it in September. And we did that with Lead Insights. It started in our Life Sciences area and one small portfolio. Very soon, it was across the whole of Life Sciences, and then it's spread across the rest of Connect, and now it's going across the rest of Informa. So we have that ability to learn within the year. Problem with some one event products is you've got to wait until next year before you have another crack. So I think our ability to test and try, and I think it's been really, really helpful for Informa because we fed a lot of some of the new initiatives in, which have come and we've tested and we've learned in Connect. So that's a bit different to Patrick's, I think.

Just building on what Patrick and Andy have said, there are no hard boundaries between the divisions, in fact, less and less, and that's a good thing. We'll come back to One Informa, I'm sure. But what makes Festivals possibly a bit different is how we think of the overall product being experience-led, and that's very much in response to our customers' needs. As I shared in June at the investor field trip during Cannes, if you were there, our definition of an Informa Festivals is to craft unmissable experiences, whether physical or digital, by the way, that inspire and celebrate industries and enable our customers to meet, discover, play and grow. So hopefully, if you were in Cannes in June or if you were at Money20/20 in Las Vegas just last month, you would have seen great examples of that meet, discover, play, grow secret sauce. So again, it's not very different, but we're very focused on that 360 experience, the meeting, the discover, which is the content; the play, which is the experience; and the grow, which is the recognition.

Now since you've raised hand, Matthieu, why don't we stay on the topic of Ascential because many of the audience will have been familiar with Ascential before the acquisition. What has Informa brought to some of the brands within that portfolio?

Thanks, Penny. For the ex-Ascential brands and teams, without a doubt, the biggest benefit from Informa is the access to the global platform. Phil Thomas, the ex-CEO of Ascential, who many of you know, would absolutely be the first to recognize this. For him and for Ascential plc stand-alone, unlocking the Middle East, unlocking Asia, unlocking Lat Am was very, very hard indeed. So that's for sure the biggest unlock.

And Patrick and Andy, it'd be lovely to hear from you in terms of what is it bringing to the portfolio in terms of having Money20/20 and Cannes Lion within the portfolio for Informa more widely.

First for you there.

Well, look, I think as Matthieu, at least to the focus on brand and brand building and real exceptional experience. I mean markets -- Informa Markets, Informa, generally, we've got some fantastic brands. And I think we can do much more with them. And we're certainly learning that from the Ascential team. That experience, that focus on creating a really outstanding experience as well as must attend is a great opportunity for us.

I think having something on the beach obviously really helps as well. So I certainly enjoy going to Cannes. Andy, I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Yes. I mean Patrick said most of what I was going to say. But I think when I turned up to Money20/20 for the first time to see it and realized it was this incredibly theatrical experience and the idea of creative directors who control the look and the feel and the brand doesn't happen in my business historically. We tend to bring the bits together fantastically well. They coordinate brilliantly, but they're a bit commercial. And I would want someone to walk away from my event and say, "God, I love that event." Using the word love. That's what brands do for you. We've got a bit of a journey to do. Some of them, there's no doubt they do that, but that's where we aspire to get. And I think the confidence to invest in those qualities and build them, which is what Matthieu's team is doing and will do, will be fantastic for all of us.

Amazing. And we touched on there a bit about international expansion. So where are we on that journey, do you think? Matthieu, do you want to start?

So as I said, geo is one of the key building block of the growth framework for all of us. I'm personally and I speak on behalf of my team when I say that we're all very, very excited about this. As I said, we've had a really great example this year already with the launch of Money20/20 in KSA with Annabel, Mike and our partners from Tahaluf. Our customers loved it, our partners loved it, the teams working on it loved it. It was a great example of taking a great brand in a completely new market and just making a big splash. So as I said, I've got the privilege of working with a portfolio of amazing brands, pretty much all of them with global relevance, but not all of them with a global footprint. So yes, this is something we're actively working on. You can think Lions, you can think GDC, you can think Black Hat, we're looking at all of those opportunities and actively pursuing them. More to come.

Amazing. Andy?

I'm going to flip it back the other way actually by using SuperReturn as an example because SuperReturn, you saw it's got 24, 27 events, how many losing track of it. It's across many, many geographies already. We've got East and Western U.S.A. We've got across Europe. We've got East and West Africa. We've got Japan. We've got Hong Kong. We've got Singapore. We've got it pretty much everywhere, and we've diversified from private equity into private capital, into secondaries, infrastructure, a whole range of things. So when Stephen does his chart, we've actually gone along that journey phenomenally well. And we're probably 8x bigger than we were back in 2014 because we've ticked all those boxes. But then the issue we haven't ticked and beat, we are not preeminent in the U.S. So perversely, it's America, the biggest market we've got to focus back on and actually make a bigger impact there, and that will be hopefully part of our plans going forward. But the Life Science and Tech businesses do have to expand. So they will be expanding, and we've got plans to move across geographically as we go forward in those 2 areas.

Amazing. Patrick, anything to add?

Not much to add. I mean we have the huge benefit of fantastic brands working across some really spectacular end markets by way of category. And we've -- with that global reach that we have, we have the opportunity to take those brands both geographically and by category to different places in different formats. We've done some of that, but I think we can certainly do more, and it is our intention to do more.

Amazing. And we heard a little bit earlier today about One Informa. So it would be great to hear about what that means to you. Patrick?

I'd focus on 2 things. I think -- or maybe 3, certainly the ability to bring products and services to markets faster through One Informa to take friction out of the customer experience. And I think having more common platforms enables you to have more common ways of working, which is a scale benefit for us, but also a benefit in terms of colleague mobility, for example, we've seen a significant increase in the last years and focus on internal mobility around the company, which enables us to learn and share best practice. I think One Informa will facilitate that also.

Amazing.

I agree with all of that. The thing that I really hope comes out of One Informa, I mean, I've had previous careers in Unilever and Diageo. Unilever is very well known for a marketing company. Diageo, when I joined part of the Guinness and Grand Met merger, decided it would create the Diageo way of brand building, and it transforms the performance of their business. I think we've got to be phenomenal at our marketing within Informa. And I really hope and believe this is going to move us to the next level, having common platforms, best practice sharing academies, training people up. And I think that's going to make a significant difference to our performance.

Exciting. Matthieu, what about you?

So I think of One Informa as a really exciting -- maybe a little bit overdue, if I may say, being the newest member of the team here, but exciting investment -- transformation investment program. Effectively, we're looking at building, in my language, a more consistent more efficient, better performing backbone, enabling our businesses across the board to get better service at lower cost in technology, in GBS, in customer service, in data analytics and -- that's a plumbing part of it, which I think is really critical and a big change, maybe overdue. But building on Patrick and his point, the culture piece, there's an amazing culture Informa. That's one of the reasons I'm here. But that's one Informa, I really believe is an additional culture multiplier, same agenda, same platforms, same mobility, same career opportunities, same talent management, et cetera. So the plumbing is exciting because it's an unlock, but the culture is a multiplier as well.

Sounds fantastic. Now you just touched on there on excitement. So as my final question before we hand back to Stephen for questions. What are you most excited about for the year ahead? Matthieu?

Well, we've all said and Stephen will reinforce, I'm sure that 2025 has been a good year. But when I stand back from it all, what's exciting for me is I think Informa is very much at the start of this growth journey, not at the end, it's very much the start, building on everything we've talked about.

Andy?

I'm going to go back to AI. I think AI is going to be a fantastic capability enhancer, especially in sales and especially in marketing. And my connector during town hall today about the opportunities from AI. And I want everyone to believe that they can be better at their jobs, and they will be better at their jobs because of it. I really think it will transform our ability to resell, collect new business, to all of the key things in sales and marketing going forward. And I think that's going to be a game changer for us.

I absolutely agree with you. Patrick, how about you?

I think, look, growth and opportunity. It's going to be great to look forward and see further growth. And that growth creates opportunity for our customers, for our colleagues and for our investors. I think that's very exciting, and that's what I'm looking forward to.

Amazing. Thank you very much. Thank you.

Okay. Who wants to ask a question? Any question? We have a couple of mics. You go wherever you choose. That means I don't have to favor anyone. No, no, not him.

A couple of where are you questions, if I can. I think the first one we've discussed a little bit in the past. Where do you feel you are -- maybe one for you, Stephen, in terms of percentage completion or wherever in finding the right equilibrium on the pure price within your events, both on the exhibitor side, but also it sounds today like you're increasingly seeing maybe an opportunity on the attendee side? And then secondly, and I guess we've seen a bit of this in the demo sessions, but how early or how far down the path do you feel you are with regards to using that first-party data to drive up yield?

Thanks, George. I'll give you an answer and then maybe throw it to anyone else on the panel who wants to come in. I would say on price, I mean this is how I cut into your question. I think it's -- some of you were investors and George, you know our business very well. If you were around this industry in 2020, I mean, it was existential. The one -- I mean I was slightly joking in my presentation, but only just. There were lots of people who were convinced that face-to-face events would not come back or if they came back, they would come back in a de minimis form, in a de minimis form. So when the market returned not with sort of acceptance, but with enthusiasm, I think that then allowed the industry to reassess its -- the industry, not just Informa, to reassess its whole position on price to value. And so I think it gave the industry an injection of confidence that actually customers were voting with their feet and their wallet. Inside Informa, we use that to really build some capability. So I would say we feel confident now that pricing is a skill set within the business and that there's much more we can do with it. I don't know, Patrick, Andy, do you want to comment on that? Go Patrick.

I think we've done a reasonable job of pricing since we came out of COVID. We've been, I think, conservative on that. First priority was to recover compound inflation, which I think by the end of 2025, generally across Informa Markets, we will have done. We've learned a lot, and we've built a capability within the business on pricing to be going forward much more sophisticated about it, much more targeted about it. And just touching on the attendee pricing, which I think was on one of the earlier slides, Informa Markets is, relatively speaking, generating much less revenues from a much bigger base on attendee pricing, but we are making progress on that. As Stephen said, it follows value. Two side benefits of pricing for attendees in Informa Markets. One is that you get to know more about the attendee, which is really helping in terms of our first-party data. And secondly, you have a much greater propensity from registration to turning up if you've paid. So it's delivering those benefits as well. So we're very keen to develop it further. Andy?

Yes. I think every single event, we turn price to value. We try and find out what is the key value we offer our customers. And in my area, it might be sort of frictionless networking. And it's quite easy to work out whether we're delivering that through measuring and monitoring as we go through, interviewing our customers afterwards. But we had the conversation you and I a month or so again, Stephen, what's the most valuable thing for VIPs in this world, it's their time. And if you help them do their business in a more fluid, frictionless way and give them what they want, the price can go up and up and up. If you start under delivering on that, you'll have a problem. So we have to deliver to that value as well as pricing to value.

On first-party data to your second question, I would say we have done -- we've made a lot of progress on base level capability, collection, standardization, form structure. We've made good progress in sales, but I agree with Andy's point on the stage that there's more we can do in combining first-party data and AI capability just to make our sales capabilities much more effective. On marketing, I think there's a real prize there for us on a better use. I mean one of the -- it's now become a subject of discussion in many places, but one of the many strengths of our business, including Penny's business and Gary's business, is we're not super dependent upon referred traffic. We never really were because we have a primary relationship with our authors, with our researchers, with our attendees, with our delegates, with our exhibitors. And in Informa TechTarget, we're a significant content owner. So therefore, we're quite happy with primary or unintermediated audience referral. So that's less of a threat to our business than it is in many other areas and first-party data is part of that. There were some other hands up.

Will Larwood from Berenberg. Firstly, just you've spoken about pricing volume and yield before being 1/3, 1/3, 1/3 in this new 6% growth phase. Does that change, particularly in relation to the comments around pricing? Secondly, you highlighted a number of sort of global gateway cities. Going forward, can we expect, particularly given the supply coming on, can we expect to see more JVs being signed? Or do you expect it to be more developed on sort of organic -- purely on an organic basis? And then finally, just in terms of the Middle East region, obviously, that has been a key growth driver over the last couple of years. Sort of what can we expect in terms of growth rates for that region going forward?

Great questions. Let me have a pop at the second and the third and maybe anyone on the stage come back in on the price yield volume mix. On the second, which was JVs, I mean, you may have heard us say this before, partnerships is part of our business model. I mean it's sort of inherent in what we do. In fact, it's not sort of. It's inherent in what we do. I mean, in Penny's business, we take somebody's work and then we validate it, authenticate it and then we publish and distribute and we support it. But it's essentially a partnership between the publisher and the author or the researcher or the institution. In the B2B events business, we create a stage sometimes literally, but definitely metaphorically for buyers and sellers, importers, exporters, wholesalers, distributors to meet. I mean Informa is visible, but you'll notice this when you go to the Dubai Airshow tomorrow, you'd be hard-pressed to know it was our show, and I'm really good with that. Our success as a business is that actually we're really good at creating partnerships where the people who are at the front of the camera are the customer or in the B2B business, the industry because that's what creates the dynamic where we can do what we do and we take a fair share of our value. And that goes back to George's question, over time, I think that will allow us to price and enhance our yield. So for us, it's a natural extension of that set of facts that is there an efficient -- what's the most efficient way of getting into a market? So let's take China as an example. We're in China essentially in 3 ways. We have a wholly owned business. We have a business that we own the majority of, but the founder of the business still owns 30% of it and actually doesn't trade under Informa. It doesn't trade on Informa Markets, it trades under Sinoexpo. And then we have a portfolio of joint ventures where we have 8, 9 joint ventures of varying different shapes, which trade under multiple different names. In Saudi Arabia, we own the majority of the business, but it trades under Tahaluf, it's Informa Group company, but it's a different name. We have 12, 15 partnerships with trade associations where we bought their show and we own some all. Always the majority, but never necessarily 100%. We've got a joint venture with the principality of Monaco where they own 10%, we own 90%, but we run it absolutely as a joint venture. I could go on. I mean -- and here, we have the emerging possibility of OneCo, where we'll be -- again, we'll own the majority, but it will be absolutely a joint venture partnership. Each of those we've done because it's enabled us to go somewhere quicker at a lower cost and a higher return than if we'd had to use 100% of our own capital to get there, not because we were capital constrained, but it was the most effective way of building the business. I'm not saying that because I'm preconfiguring there are 3 more tomorrow. I'm not. But we're not uncomfortable with it in any way, shape or form. I think we're good at it. I think we understand how to do it. It doesn't mean we're patsies, speak to any of our partners, they would tell you that. And I always say we only really have 3 criteria for partnership arrangements. Number one, we always have to be in the majority, not because we're control for each, in fact, we're not, but it just makes life simpler. Number two, we have to like each other. Not we have to like them or they have to like us. We have to like each other because to whoever asked the cultural question, ours is a people business, you need to get on with each other. There's no point in having a partnership where you hate each other or you just trust each other. And thirdly, we both know we're going to make more money doing it together than we would do it separately. If you can line those 3 things up, you can create as many partnerships as you like, and we're very happy to do so. Your second question was on -- sorry, your third question was on?

Middle East.

Middle East, what will the growth rates be? Higher than 6%. The first question on pricing, yield, volume, what's the mix going to be in '26 to '28, what do you think? 1/3, 1/3, 1/3 or more price, more yield, more volume?

I think 1/3, 1/3 and 1/3. I mean I'd be very comfortable if yield and volume was a greater proportion than price, not because price is going down, but because the other 2 are going up faster.

I think that's the secret sauce. Patrick, as often gets it spot on. I mean it's not that we are -- we want to be conservative about pricing, but the real price is to drive up your yield and your volume because then the value is inherent to your customer and there's more demand. If you do that, the price will follow. Andy, Matthieu, anything?

Nothing to add.

No. Next question. The lady at the back, if we could. Why don't you -- you've got the mic. You got the mic go.

It's Ciaran Donnelly from Citi. Two for me. One, maybe, Stephen, first, in your presentation, you talked about the market structurally growing. I guess, could you help us kind of put some numbers around that? And then I guess, in the context of your 6% kind of target, how ambitious is that 6%? I guess one of your peers is growing their exhibitions business at kind of 8%. So what could be that delta to kind of tick up that 6%, maybe 7%, 8% or more? And then two, maybe one for the panel. If we think of kind of the events outside of top 50, what are some events that could be in that top 50 in kind of 3 to 5 years? And maybe why are they particular standouts in the portfolio?

That's a great question. I'm interested in the answer to that. So 3 ideas each. Look, our business is going to grow this year at nearly 9%. So don't misinterpret our, if you like, our kind of base level compound sort of promissory note to the market with the ceiling of our ambition. It's a floor, not a ceiling. But what we're trying to say from an investment point of view is there is a base level of compound value here, which actually today isn't manifesting itself in our price. You then have to make your own judgment about what the ambition performance might be on top of that. But that's -- even at that level, at 6%, that's 3x what it was 8, 9 years ago. So it's not like it's not a step-up. And what we're saying is we're laying that out over a 3- to 4-year period. So that's the way I would cut into that. But we're not saying that, that is -- that's the kind of end of the runway. How important will supply be? To the actual percentage growth, probably not that much in absolute terms because we're already filling millions of square meters, but it's relevant to volume and demand. And it also is relevant slightly to the prior question around partnerships because it then maintains this sort of city competition, which is good for our business. So it's good to see new capacity, not just because it's more volume, but it generally sort of in that sense, I say this because I wandered around an airplane this morning on the runway as you might tomorrow. It's -- when you've got new rolling stock, if you like, new capacity, it means the existing capacity has to up its game, too. So just generally, to the point that Patrick and Matthieu make about just -- and Andy about improving the actual experience of the product, you want your capacity to be good capacity. It's not just the volume. It's the nature of the capacity. So I think new stock is always good for any industry because it serves to define the experience a bit. So definitely, we'll fill it. And in places like here and in a couple of other markets I could name, we're probably the lead contender to fill it. So that's good. But I think it also ups the quality of the experience for customers, and that takes us back to yield and volume. Okay, which are the 3 that are in the next 450 that are going to be in the top 50 in 3 years, what we reckon?

Definitely, wellness, longevity brand.

Yes. Wellness and longevity.

Yes.

You're only giving one?

Well, I thought I'd let the others have a go.

Matthieu?

Well, for me, again, I'm blessed with the portfolio where most of the brands are already large-scale brands with the exception of the Tech Week portfolio. That's London Tech Week, Africa Tech Week and Asia Tech Week. And those are great brands, great product, a little bit subscale. So we're doing a lot of work to really scale them up. We know the market is there. We have competitors doing great, including here. So that's the opportunity for scaling up.

Data Center World as well.

[indiscernible] Patrick?

It's a bit like picking favorite children, and I've got quite a few of those as well. And my favorite changes on a regular basis. So I'm not going to pick a particular show other than to say, I think the shows where we can really bring the brand and the experience at a heightened level are going to be the ones that really accelerate and will add to that sort of super brand cast. I was looking at one of the brands actually yesterday, Newtopia, and it has a fantastic product called Beacon.