Informa plc (INF) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you very much. Am I -- if you got the right volume. We're ready to go. Okay. Thank you very much for those of you who come here in person. We have about the latest count. I just got the latest head count, we've got about 225 people who are guests, externals, who are on the webcast. And we've got a few hundred colleagues as well who are on the webcast. So certainly speaking for myself, I'm not guiding my fellow presenters. I'm going to say relatively locked to the lectern, not because I'm nervous of you, but because it means that it broadcasts better for those who are -- thank you very much, for those who are on the webcast. So welcome to our Capital Markets Day. And I hope at least some of you have had a chance to read the press release that we released at mid-day today to get a sense of what we're going to be talking about today. You've got copies, I think, of the presentations in front of you and certainly on the webcast. You can also see a copy and you can follow it live. Before I get into what we're talking about, here is the appropriate disclaimer. We are perhaps even more than we normally would be making forward-looking statements today. Very much so, we're going to be talking about how we see the world from here through to 2024. And so those statements come with the normal disclaimers for you to make your own and sort appropriately skeptical judgments. Today, I'll be joined by colleagues. Gareth and I will do the opening session, which will probably take about 40 minutes, and then we'll go into questions. And then we'll take a bit of a comfort break for those of us who are here in person and indeed, those who are on the webcast. And then we'll come back. And Charlie McCurdy, Annie Callanan and Max Gabriel will lead the second session, and then we'll have a Q&A at the end of that, and then it's a wrap. So that's the flow of the day. What are we here to talk about? Well, we're here to talk about the future of our company. We here to talk about the future of Informa. As you know, this company has been like a number, affected by the real practical implications of the COVID pandemic. And I'll talk a bit about that, but I'll talk about it really very briefly because today, in the main, what we're talking about is where is the company going, not how is the company surviving or living through COVID. We called it our growth acceleration plan through to 2024. And the relevance of that will, I hope, become very clear to you as we unpack how we're thinking about the future of the company. But in essence, this is it in a nutshell. The decision we have made as a company is that in order for us to get back into growth and acceleration, we made a decision to focus the company on the brands and the markets where we have a leadership position. We have scale and we can see future market growth. And for us, that's in our B2B markets and attendant digital services. We'll unpack that in some detail. And in our academic markets, and in attendant knowledge services, and we'll unpack that in some detail as well. As a consequence, we've made the decision to divest our Informa Intelligence portfolio of brands, and we'll give you a sense of the thinking behind that, where those businesses are and why we think that's the right decision. We have a high degree of confidence in the value of those businesses for 2 reasons or maybe 3. The first is we have been through a small-scale disposal process through 2021 of some very, very niche businesses where we ended up trading those businesses at on an average, 17x earnings multiple. Second reason, the portfolio of businesses that we will be divesting, our Vessel Tracking business, our Informa Intelligence business and our fund flow and income businesses, these businesses are all in upper quartile peer group growth rates with high subscription rates, high renewal rates and a very powerful product position. And the third reason is we've had quite significant inflow of interest, specified interest in the brands and the assets. So we're confident about the decision, and we'll talk through what the consequences of that will be for proceeds and the allocation of those proceeds. To go back a bit before we go forward, what business are we in? What market are we in? We've said for many years, I think, for coming on 8, that we trade in this market the knowledge and information economy. I think when we first used a version of this slide, one of our shareholders said to me that, I'm not entirely sure that, that is a market. We have been very clear for some time that this is a category of growth and opportunity in the way in which the global economy is developing. All of the metrics that we look at indicate that growth rates in the knowledge and information economy will exceed GDP growth rates over the following years and that our market position in both B2B markets and academic markets, places us in a very strong macro market. Where do we trade in that market? Our position in that market is specialism, expertise in specified sectors and categories, deep, depth of expertise, of customer relationship, of subject matter knowledge and of data and increasingly of data analytics and deeper customer and buyer and user understanding. Championing the specialists we've been using as our own internal and external mission statement for 3 or 4 years now. It binds the company in both approach and in values, whilst allowing our brands and our businesses to trade with freedom and entrepreneurialism in the markets that they serve. Where has the company been over the last few years? Well, if you go back to go forward, for those who've been shareholders or following the company for some time, back in 2013, 2014, it's certainly, for us at least worth reflecting on where the company has come from to because it's relevant, I think, to where we might go to. Back in 2013, the biggest business in the group was our academic business. The second biggest business in the group was our conference business. We were the largest producer of high-volume unit delegate-based conferences in the world. And then we had a series of really very fragmented, underperforming materially under-invested information services businesses, which at the time many people, not unreasonably because this was a business that was declining at about 10% a year. We're of the view that we should just exit that business and do what we're doing today, which is focused on the 2 markets where we could conceivably build to scale. Our academic markets business and at the time, what was deemed our Conference business. That was the lingua franca of how people describe it. The decision we made on the GAP I was that, that would be the wrong decision because in our events business, we knew we needed to switch out of conferences and into trade shows. We needed to get into the exhibition market because our view was the exhibition market would give us long-term competitive advantage and a position from which we could scale. Secondly, our judgment was that our information services businesses were not fundamentally damaged brands or indeed lacking in proprietary data, which are the 2 key pillars around which you need to build those businesses. They just have been woefully under-invested in technology and appropriate skills to service their customers. And in our academic business, probably our single biggest miss was that we had looked at the open access business with fear rather than with opportunity. So in all 3 of our markets, we decided we would invest for growth and acceleration, and that's what we did through GAP I. We then, of course, ran that program for a period. And by and large, it did pretty well. And over the period, you saw the group grow, partly through acquisition, partly through performance, partly through skills, partly through deployed technology and partly, in fact, if not largely through the hard work of thousands of colleagues around the company. And it got us to a place by 2019, where we were where we wanted to be. We had an open access business and an open research position to speak of in academic markets, and we had deployed some investment in technology and skills. We have switched our B2B business from conferences to trade shows, and we had rebuilt and repurposed our Information Services business. And that produced a reasonably attractive repetitive return rate for shareholders on pretty much any metric you would choose to measure. But then, of course, COVID came along. And COVID was an exogenous circumstance for us because 50%, 55% of our business, if not more, required some degree of physical gathering. And we now sit here in, where are we, December 2021. And of course, this started in January 2020. You all have your own view as to when it started when you thought it was going to come to an end. But I'll take a place bet with anyone, but nobody was predicting it would last as long as it has or have the impact that it's had. Fortunately, in our position, the only advantage of being in our line of work as we saw it fast. We saw it early, and we concluded it would be very potentially damaging to the company. So we moved at some speed to postpone virtually the entirety of our global events program on a rolling 6-month basis until we could see markets reopen. We restructured the balance sheet, we repatriated a load of debt. We turn to shareholders who supported us in an equity issuance, and we radically trimmed our costs. And at the same time, by then, fortunately, both our academic business and our Information Services business, the latter in particular, have moved from underperformance to high performance, and those 2 businesses have served the portfolio extremely well over the period. Has it been all bad? Well, I'm making no comment on personal circumstances. All of us, I suspect, will have experienced some sadness or illness or God forbid tragedy through COVID. But from a business perspective, it has been extraordinarily challenging for a business like ours, but we've also learned some things. And it's definitely the case that in many parts of our business, the future that we all knew was coming, has arrived really a lot earlier and with a lot more speed and impact as a result of COVID. And we have tried over the last period to embrace some of those impacts whilst at the same time working out how do we ensure they don't cause lasting damage to the company, its brands, its customer relationships or in the long term, its revenues. And it's those learnings, the accelerated impacts of change in working, increasing digitization, the increasing importance of data, the value of brands, the power of specialism that will drive the plan that we're laying out for GAP II. What's our ambition? Our ambition is to consolidate our leadership position in the B2B markets, and move with some purpose into what we will lay out very clearly is an expansion into smart events, hybrid and high digitization and into B2B market access and at the same time, further increase the growth rate in our academic markets business by both increasing investment in the core and increasing investment in attendant knowledge services. We see that producing very attractive growth rates over the period of the plan. We think it has implications for skills. We think it has implications for talent. We think it has implications for technology but we think it also has implications for us from a portfolio perspective, and that has led us to the conclusion that we've reached in relation to Informa Intelligence. I want to talk briefly about sustainability before I then unpick and unpack the detail of the GAP program on a per division basis. We started investing in leadership and sustainability under Ben, who is here with us today and now his team back in '20, help me Ben, 2016. And slowly but surely, we have been operationalizing an approach to creating a sustainable enterprise on pretty much any key dimension you can measure, whether that's energy consumption impact manufacturing, where we're involved in it, supply chain or importantly for us, the multiplier effect and impact we can have through our content and our connections with customers. We are in a very robust position as a company on the ESG sustainability indexes, whether it be Dow Jones, where I was delighted to see the company after 5 years of participation get ranked as the #1 globally in category. We just had our -- I think our new CDP ranking we issued today at an A-. Similarly, we fully signed up to the science-based targets and we underpin operationally what we're doing in both Charlie's business and Annie's business, which they will bring to life in their own presentations. So we approach the growth acceleration period with a very strong confidence that on the increasingly important aspect of long-term operational sustainability we sit in a very powerful position. Let's talk about the group as a whole under GAP. What's our ambition? 2019, this just shapes the group. 2019 reported, 2019 was the last year before COVID, and then we've had this, what we're calling here the transition period. We can debate what that is. But for the sake of discussion, it's some blend of 2020 and 2021. And then where do we want the company to be by the time we get to 2024? Well, the first thing to recognize is that one of the things we've taken out of COVID is that whilst we had a small tail of third and fourth tier small B2B Events. Nevertheless, we had one. And so we've taken the decision through COVID essentially to shutter those products and services. The second thing is, fortunately, we did go into COVID in our B2B Events business with a reasonably credible position in B2B digital services. Even in 2021, it will be somewhere near GBP 300 million worth of revenue. This is a non-trivial business in that market. Our intention over the period is to build that significantly through a combination of investment and acquisition. And so we get to '24 with a mix of business which has higher quality and higher growth rates. If you take that down into the markets portfolio, what that shows you is a business that ends up by 2024 with nearly 25% of the revenues in digital services and the overall performance exceeding where we were in 2019. Just want to talk a bit about B2B Events. If I had $1 or GBP 1 or GBP 1 of revenue for every time I've been asked the question, do you think as a result of COVID anyone will ever go to an event ever again in some version, our revenues will be marginally higher than there are today. And Charlie will get into this in real detail. There is no doubt that COVID has had a practical impact. I don't know how many of you tried to do transatlantic or even European, let alone transcontinental airline travel. It is definitely -- there's definitely more friction in that travel experience than there was pre-COVID. In many instances, international and transcontinental travel has effectively grown to 0. And so the business has found itself focusing more on regions and subregions than was previously the case. But what has also been the case is when markets have reopened, the level of customer interest and participation is significant. And we have traded in every market of scale that we have been in through 2021. Mainland China, North America and the rest of the world, probably in that order of participation rates and revenue and speed to reopening, although they have, as many will be aware, been some local then subregional closure moments or lockdown moments in some regions and cities in Mainland China. To put some numbers around it, in 2021, we will probably do about GBP 600 million worth of face-to-face only revenues in all of our event-led businesses. Put that into context, there's probably about another GBP 200 million to GBP 300 million of digital and media services that sits on top of that. An average delegate price for those high-value branded delegate businesses that we still run and trade is probably around $2,000 ahead. An average booth price might be around, give me a price, Charlie, $20,000, $25,000. So we have got significant participation rates. The other thing to remember in 2021 is that we didn't reopen in North America until June. So actually, we haven't traded a full year because our postponement program because of the extended impact of COVID ran on until June of 2021. So when you look at 2021, you're not looking at anything that resembles a normalized year. And where could we take this business? And here I am going to move away from the collection, just to try and bring this to life if I stay on mic. If you look, this is just an attempt and it's apologies to those of you who do this for a living, but this is an attempt to look at market categories. In essence, over on the left-hand side is what you might broadly call the B2B market access business, connecting buyers and sellers because that's essentially the business that we are in, in all of those businesses. And we are primarily, in fact, largely exclusively today in the B2B Events section of it. It's roughly about a $40 billion market. If you look at the bottom end of it, the digital market access, so nonphysical, non-face-to-face, so the provision of services, connecting buyers and sellers that in some way, shape or form, comes through some form of digital or data product or service. How does that break down? Well, that breaks down through a number of different products and services. But the one I'd concentrated on is what we broadly call campaign services, providing products and services that allow buyers to connect with buyers on an increasingly accurate and efficient basis. And then when you break that market up, the real sweet spot for us in what we call digital demand generation and Max in particular, will really bring this to life, hopefully, for everyone here. Our judgment is that as a result of our first-party data and indeed the second-party data we can mix with that and the way in which we collect it, collate it and then monetize it, there is a significant opportunity for us commercially to drive growth and increase the quality of our relationships with our customers. In Max's section, he will look underneath the bonnet of something I think we announced to the market some time ago, IRS, our own internal first-party data engine. What do we do with the tens of millions of database, behavioral-based, demographic-based interactions we have with our customers in every 1 of our events in all of our markets and all of our sectors around the world. What does that then mean in how we can develop products and services that can sit alongside the face-to-face event experience. And then in addition to that, what more could we do with that proprietary data, what are the services could we deliver. That's the way we are thinking about the return to growth in our B2B markets business. We have confidence in the physical product. We see markets returning, and we have significant confidence in our ability to expand that market into new areas, whether it be the digitization of the physical event, so it can be like this event today, physical and hybrid or into digital demand generation predicated on the strength of our position in data and analytics. We have announced today a small acquisition. We've done NetLine, which is a proprietary intent scoring business, which we are putting in our tech sector, which gives us a bit of additional capabilities, specifically aimed at that market because we believe that the tech market -- the B2B tech market is probably the earliest adopter of many of these products and services. In academic markets, well, in academic, that has been less severely affected by COVID, although it wasn't not affected by COVID, let's be clear about that. And there was definitely a period of about, I don't know, Annie and Christoph will keep me on it, 2 to 3 months in 2020, when U.S. campuses closed down and bookshops around the world closed and no one quite knew what was going to happen, when there was an aha moment, and we weren't quite sure what was going to happen. But fundamentally, that business remained really very robust. And in many instances, it unleashed a volume of new knowledge and new knowledge participants, which is, I think, very relevant to our forward story. The fundamentals of that business have, therefore, remained very strong. The question is how does that move from being a steady as she goes market to being a growth market? What underpins that? And Annie will bring that to life really through a number of different lenses. The first one is the increase in funding. Historically, we often had what you might call either focused or narrow conversations about the challenges facing library budgets and the demands being placed on people like us who are providing services, subscription services in the main to libraries who are facing budget challenges. Those are very real questions which we have approached, I think, with quite a lot of commercial agility. There has been less focus, I think, placed on the increase in R&D funding around the world, in scientific investment, in innovation and research, both at the first level academic innovation and then at the applied and emerging level. And we'll bring to life how those additional sources of funding are very relevant to the future of this business. On top of that, but very directly related to that is who then are the customers of this business. Are the customers, the librarians and the education institutions. Yes, they are. And will they remain critical customers? Yes, they will. But what is the customer relationship with the user, the author, the researcher, the innovator and what attendant services can you provide to those individuals as the business invests in technology and service capability. And that combination of balancing the service offering to the traditional customer and expanding the service offering to the individual customer gives us a high degree of confidence that this business can double its growth rate through the GAP period to 2024. How do you measure that apart from the obvious judgments around revenue and stable margins? Well, you can measure it in a number of ways, what's the analog to digital mix, what's the institutional versus retail revenue mix, what's the direct sales to intermediate sales? What does it mean in product sales versus service sales? What does it mean and the balance between pay-to-read and pay to publish? And all of those, I think, will be relevant metrics for people to track and follow as this business develops over the GAP period in the next 3 years. One of the things that's really transformed this business and in truth has largely been a focus driven by Annie since she joined the company 3 or 4 years ago is recognize that you want to do business where your customer is rather than where you might want to be yourself. And how do you track that? How do you engage with that customer in a way that allows you to drive connection, visibility, participation, repeat visitation, time, engagement and then from a long-term commercial point of view, value. And Annie will bring to life very compellingly the progress that we've already made, as this chart demonstrates, but also where we think we can take this over the next 3- to 4-year period. So that's our B2B markets business and our academic markets business. What about our intelligence business? Well, as I said at the beginning, this is where we were back in 2014. We did actually sell one business back in 2014 for 7x earnings multiple. We sold our consumer research publishing business, as some of you may remember. Since then, we have decided to focus in on 3 markets, and we've invested largely organically. We made a couple of very small competency bolt-on acquisitions, but largely organically in the technology, in the product, in our knowledge centers in the skills in the business and importantly, in the way in which we manage our customers. This business is now tracking at a 6% plus annualized growth rate 90% plus subscription rates and high levels of renewal and a very, very attractive forward pipeline into 2022. In the 3 markets where we have strong brands and very proprietary data, we have very attractive businesses and brands. And despite that, our view is that the best future for these businesses, given our prioritization of our 2 lead markets is probably with somebody else. And so we are announcing today that we're commencing a divestment process. It will probably, I suspect, end up being a 3 individual divestments, it's conceivable that somebody might wish to acquire the entire portfolio, but the prior indications and approaches we've had tend to be on a by subvertical and category basis. We suspect that this process will take some, if not all, of 2022. I heard Richard on the phone guiding somebody in their model earlier. But the way to think about it is probably half of the revenues and half of the profits will be with the company through 2022. For now, that's a reasonable assumption. I know that because Richard has told me. And -- but we commenced that process effective today. And we think the consequence of that will be good for those brands. It will be good for those colleagues. And it will also be very good for the group. It will allow the group to focus on where we can see growth and acceleration where we have scale and leadership market positions. Our judgment is that the value of these businesses will exceed the average multiple value of the smaller businesses that we sold through 2021. And our intention, therefore, subject to sale and completion, is that we would see around GBP 1 billion worth of returns flow back to shareholders through a mixture of buybacks and dividends, and we would seek to get that done through 2022. We believe that, that will leave us with a reasonable reasonably strengthened balance sheet. We've actually done a very good job from the high point of our leverage as a result of the COVID impact to getting what looks like our year-end leverage to around 3x. But the net consequence of this will fundamentally strengthen our balance sheet and give us the firepower that we will want to be able to invest for consolidation, the innovation, for growth and for expansion in B2B markets and in academic markets. And that, in essence, is the nub of what we are saying today about the future of the company. That process around divestment returns, we will keep the market informed as it unfolds over the preceding weeks and months. The business at the moment is tracking to guidance, which Gareth will take you through, which we'll see us around GBP 325 million free cash flow in 2021, which is really an outstanding performance, given again the impact that COVID had on our cash position in 2020. We're also announcing today that our confidence in the underlying business, notwithstanding the divestment of Informa Intelligence is allowing us to signal the resumption of ordinary dividends in 2022. And we've guided on what the revenue expectations are based on what we see in forward bookings and forward participation in our Events business and the likely growth rate in Taylor & Francis. And at this point, I'd like to hand over to Gareth. Gareth?

Thank you, Stephen. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for taking the time to join us today, either here in the room or on the video phase. In terms of my presentation, the first slide kind of summarizes the headlines I'm going to talk about. So I'm going to run through that to give you the big picture and the overall view. And then through the rest of the presentation, I'm going to pick some of the details behind it to give you some of the color. Today's news is fundamentally a growth story, setting out our ambition for the next 3-year period for how we want to build off our capabilities and experiences from the successful growth acceleration plan that we ran in 2014 to 2017 and targeting a return above rebased levels of 2019 revenues by the time we get to 2024. In that will deliver a higher quality mix of revenues and will also exit the GAP II period with a faster exit growth trajectory for new Informa. We'll be focusing on the 2 markets where we have leadership positions of scale and to focus on 2 markets, we've taken the decision to divest of Informa Intelligence. As Stephen said, in 2021, we've divested 3 smaller Informa Intelligence businesses for an average multiple brand about 16 to 17x EBITDA. And those were good businesses, but they weren't as good and as strong as the remainder of the Informa Intelligence business that we currently hold. And therefore, we expect the divestment of the division in 2022 to achieve a higher multiple. So in other words, we're divesting at highly attractive multiples and reinvesting the proceeds into market leadership positions where we believe there's further growth for us to go for. These multiples will also result in a valuation ahead of the sum of the parts valuation that would have been attributed to Informa Intelligence before today's announcement. The divestment crystallizes the substantial value creation delivered by Informa colleagues since 2014. And that value creation has been driven by higher levels of sustainable revenue growth in the business driving a higher valuation multiple. And just to be clear, the underpin a foundation of that improved performance was the first growth acceleration plan program we ran for 2014 to 2017, which we're now looking to repeat in the business. Divestment demonstrates discipline on our capital allocation processes as we recycle those higher valuation multiples into growth opportunities in market-leading positions. The divestment proceeds generated together with the inorganic and organic investment requirements for Informa Intelligence that we're now avoiding ensure that the substantial capital available to pursue the growth opportunities in the market-leading positions that we retain both through inorganic and organic opportunities. GBP 1 billion of the embedded value realized will be returned to shareholders through a combination of share buybacks and through special dividends. But at the same time, we'll be restarting our program of ordinary dividends in '22 declaring an ordinary dividend in the half year results of 2022 and paying out cash in the second half of the year to shareholders. Now to be clear, that ordinary dividend program is funded out of trading operating cash flows. It's not related to the divestment proceeds that we're rating -- we're raising. And we have confidence around our ability to deliver those cash flows based on the strong cash flow performance we've seen from the business in 2021. The remainder of the embedded value realized will be redeployed into organic and look, inorganic investment opportunities in our 2 leadership businesses. And we're confident in our ability to execute on those positions, and we're confident in the ability of those opportunities to deliver significant additional earnings across the period of GAP II. So those are the headlines. I'm now going to pick some of the details behind H2, explain what our thinking is. So as I said, we're targeting a return to rebased levels of 2019 revenues by 2024, and the next 2 slides are going to kind of set out what I mean by that. So the starting point, which I know you recognize on the left hand of the slide are the reported results for 2019, GBP 2.89 billion of revenue, GBP 933 million of OP and 51p of earnings. We then rebased those 2019 reported results for 3 mechanical adjustments that you're already kind of be aware of and you'll recognize. So first of all, around 60% of our revenues and probably even more ROP is generated from the U.S. dollar. And the U.S. dollars weakened considerably since 2019 from a 128 reported rate to something more like 137, depending on what you're modeling for 2021. So we've rebased for that. And we've also rebased the 2019 results for the net effect of additions and divestments that we've made since then, which actually is a net positive increases the base for 2019. And finally, the 2019, earnings have been rebased for the equity issuance in the first half of 2020. And so rebasing of the group's results gives you a picture with revenue of GBP 2.8 billion, OP of around GBP 900 million and earnings of circa 40p. Then for rebase for today's news around the divestment of Informa Intelligence by simply removing the 2019 reported results, you get a picture of about GBP 2.45 billion of revenue, GBP 800 million of OP and 35p of earnings. So if I take that picture from the right-hand side of that slide and bring it across to the left-hand side of this slide is the start for this model, we can then get a picture of how that compares to 2021. And as Stephen said, we're reconfirming 2021 guidance today. But if I take that guidance and remove the consensus for Informa Intelligence to get it on a like-for-like rebased basis for the left-hand side, you see a group with revenue of GBP 1.48 billion, OP of around GBP 270 million and earnings of about 10p. So in other words, you can see a position significantly behind the rebased 2019 financials. Now what we're outlining today is a strong ambition for revenues to be ahead of those rebates 2019 financials by the time we exit GAP II in 2024, driven by the returns from the GAP II program, driven by high levels of revenue growth post GAP II and underpinned by a BAU level of bolt-on activity. Now in a kind of business returns, new normal scenario there, we can see revenues north of GBP 2.6 billion in 2024. But if you then move to a scenario, once you are modeling that first scenario, what you realize is we have significant upside capacity in terms of future inorganic growth because actually in that new normal scenario, our leverage is extremely low. And depending on how you model that extra reinvestment into the business, for 2024, you can see a range of revenue outcomes up to GBP 3.3 billion of revenue for the business. And you can therefore see from that the potential for significant additional earnings to be generated across the GAP II period above and beyond the business-as-usual scenario. Now as you'll know, for regulatory reasons, we're about to do a Class 1 circular in the coming months, so you get approval for the divestment of Informa Intelligence. And therefore, unfortunately, the lawyers heavily caveat what you can and can't say about future profitability. So we can't really go into too many details on that. But a Class 1 circular will follow in due course to approve the transaction. I'm now going to focus on the change in the revenue mix that will be driven by GAP II. And you'll recognize the build of the columns here from what I've just been through going from '19 into '24. And you've noted our ambition for the '22 -- 2024 revenues to be ahead of the rebased 2019 reported revenues, as outlined on that slide. But within the next important thing is that the proportion from digital revenues increases substantially over this period to north of 40% of group revenues in 2024. This is enabled by access to new markets in B2B market access, open research, as outlined by Stephen. But also, these revenue streams are higher growth revenue streams, which will accelerate the overall group revenue growth by 2024, and will also result in these becoming increasingly larger part of the mix as they grow faster than other revenue streams. Also, they're higher quality revenue streams that we believe those revenue streams, therefore, should command a higher multiple and a higher valuation than the revenue streams we currently operate. The next 2 slides I'm going to dive into a bit of the detail behind the GAP II program to give you a feel for what we're investing in and to give you a feel for the sort of financial picture of the program. GAP II will see us invest up to GBP 150 million across the period 2022 to 2024 in our 2 market leadership businesses. For B2B markets and digital services, the investment will be in people, technology and platforms to build an enhanced data and analytics capability in the business, to monetize and maximize the opportunity from first-party data and second-party data that we collect from our customers through events. We'll also be delivering enhancements and further enhancements in our smart events products both in terms of revenue growth opportunities and also data collection potential in those businesses. For academic markets and knowledge services, the investment will be in people, technology and platforms to drive a higher level of sustainable revenue growth from open research, but also to build a platform to enable us to process more efficiently and more quickly the larger volumes of content that we anticipate us processing in that business. But at the heart of the GAP investment focus is really on data management, product management expertise, digital product development, digital marketing enablement, digital content, production and management. And that's across both of the 2 businesses that we're talking about. Now the investment will be deployed using our tried and tested processes from the GAP I program. So we'll have a Growth Acceleration Plan Investment Council, which will sign off any and all projects before they start and before any funds are committed. And the sign-off on the funding is not in full upfront. If the sign-off happens on a stage gate basis as you go through the projects, as the projects hit milestones and KPIs that demonstrate the commercial viability of the project as a whole. So it only is called down and made available as the projects prove their own potential. To give you a picture of the financials on the GAP II program, as I said, we will see an investment of about GBP 150 million across '22 to '24. We expect the investment to be around about 80% in CapEx and a net 20% in OpEx. And we expect the investment to be front-end loaded, so around 50%, 30%, 20% across the 3 years. Through the program, we're targeting incremental revenues of round about GBP 200 million by 2024, with a positive and growing OP contribution from 2024 onwards. So GAP II will deliver attractive ROIC well ahead of the group cost of capital. And just to be clear, the returns from GAP II are totally independent for any divestment proceeds and divestment reinvestment that we've outlined in terms of Informa Intelligence. So talking about that divestment process and returns, we expect the, as Stephen said, the divestment process to run across the first half of 2022, we'll be finishing in the summer. And to note, the following analysis assumes the completion of that program for all the businesses and full receipt of proceeds from those divestments. Now assuming that's what happens, about GBP 1 billion of embedded realized value we returned to shareholders, enabling shareholders to benefit from the value creation delivered by Informa colleagues over the last 5, 6 years. We're modeling the split between the special dividend and the buyback is about 50-50 at this point. But that's, I think, TBC as we go through the process. And it's also worth noting that with the daily trading volumes in our stock, if we start a share buyback program of around about GBP 500 million, which that indicates in the summer of 2022, is likely to be until half year 2023 before we'll complete the volume of transactions we need to buy back GBP 500 million worth of shares. The retained proceeds will fund growth investment in the GAP II program that I've outlined but also in targeted acquisitions to further accelerate growth in our market leadership positions and also deliver significant additional earnings over the period of GAP II targeting sort of 4 main areas: B2B Events, audience development, digital demand generation and open research services. Those are the 4 areas where we're targeting our M&A. And we can see opportunities in all these markets. We see as a team, we're experienced in delivering on inorganic growth opportunities without marking our own homework, we think we've been relatively successful at doing that. And we're also benefiting from the platforms that we've built in B2B Events and Taylor & Francis over recent years, which give us the ability to acquire assets and to scale. And lastly, we used a portion of the proceeds to reduce our leverage pay down borrowings and therefore, maintain a strong and robust balance sheet. Final slide, I'm going to talk through -- talk a bit to our financial guidance. For 2021, we are reconfirming the position we gave at the half year, which is revenue of GBP 1.8 billion, plus or minus, and OP of GBP 375 million, plus or minus. Within the mix, we're continuing to see strong performance, strong revenue performance for our 2 subscription-led businesses and strong year-on-year growth in our B2B markets businesses, albeit with some short-term local COVID disruption. We continue to be free cash flow positive, and our free cash flow forecast for the full year is now trending above GBP 325 million, which is a bit of an improvement over what I told you at the half year. And year-end leverage will be around about 3x a substantial reduction on the 6.2x leverage that we reported at the half year 2021. For 2022, the first view is how you would have looked at it before today's news around the divestment of Informa Intelligence. So revenue in the range of GBP 2.2 billion to GBP 2.4 billion, OP around about GBP 520 million to GBP 540 million. To remind you, as I said earlier, 2022 is the peak year of GAP investment, and so that has a bit of a drag effect in year for the OP. And also, we're taking a GBP 15 million charge for the acceleration of Software-as-a-Service costs following a change in the accounting treatment and only means you have to expense those costs as incurred and you're not allowed to capitalize them. I think this is adjustment and an adjustment you've seen from other peer sectors -- peer sector companies that you will have talked to. The alternative view of the 2020 guidance on the right-hand side excludes Informa Intelligence, which we've done from the middle numbers by using the 2022 consensus results for that division. And this is how you're probably going to see it with a discontinued operating accounting treatment in 2022. So revenue will be in the range just below GBP 1.9 billion to just below GBP 2.1 billion, OP of around GBP 420 million to GBP 440 million. And this year, we'll also see a return to ordinary dividends, as I've said, from the half year and the divestment of the majority of the GBP 1 billion worth of money that we're returning with some of the share buybacks falling into the first half of 2023. The earnings generated by the group will be somewhere between those 2 scenarios depending on the divestment date of the Informa Intelligence assets. So I hope that's all clear. And I'm going to pass it back to Stephen now to wrap up.

Thanks, Gareth. You've successfully gerrymandered me out of time. I can see on the clock. So let's finish and take questions. So in essence, this is the number of where we get to. Title on the previous slide is designed to say at all. How do we accelerate growth and do that by focusing our portfolio where we can see that growth. And our conclusion is we can see that growth in these 2 markets. And the question is, how do we grab an unfair share of revenues? How do we grab an unfair share of revenues from the return from physical, how do we grab an unfair share of revenues from the expansion of smart events, digital events, hybrid events, virtual events and how do we grab a share of revenues from the budgets that already exists in providing digital market access services to B2B customers, where currently, we do play, but we don't play at scale. And we need to build some technology capability, which we've started. We need to bring in some skills, which we started and we probably need to add some other skills and competencies over the period. On the right-hand side of the chart, how do we maintain an unfair share or a growing share of the traditional library budget, notwithstanding the pressures that, that's under, how do we lean into the expanding source of funding in global R&D and how do we embrace all of the customers in that market, not just the institutional library customers and how do we build a machine that can service a range of academic services alongside the traditional Books & Journal format that allows us to add further revenue to that business model. Revenue growth, revenue growth, revenue growth. That's our plan for '21 to 2024. I would like to, given the number of colleagues who I can see on the clock who are on the webcast, and I suspect a large number of those are Informa Intelligence colleagues is to put on the record our respect and admiration for what that team have done over the last 5 to 6 years. It is a transformed portfolio of businesses. And it is for that reason that we have made the judgment that now is the time to strike. We will be very particular about ensuring we maximize returns for shareholders and for our forward investment, and we maximize good ownership of those businesses for our colleagues, for our customers and for our brands. I'd now like to take some questions.

Yes. It's Nick Dempsey from Barclays. I've got 3, please. So first of all, you're flagging the GBP 150 million of GAP II investment, then you're saying that cash that you received above the GBP 1 billion of cash returns from the disposals will be used for organic and inorganic investment. Can we assume that the organic part of that is included in the GBP 150 million? Or could that turn into an extra amount of investment on top of the GBP 150 million? Second question, post recovery in 2024, I know you've been kind enough to give us some guidance out to 2024, but I'm going to go a lot bit beyond that. What kind of business growth do you think you'll have particularly in the B2B markets with the combination of digital and events. And then you mentioned, Gareth, that you expect to sell intelligence above the multiples that are in sum of the parts models. So can you tell me what those are on an EBIT or EBITDA basis, whatever you have in your head.

I'm so glad you made it, Nick. Those are exactly the questions we wanted to start, Nick. Something tells me that those questions have got your name all over them go. But can I just have a couple of them and then whilst you're thinking. On the B2B markets, your second question, Nick, which I think is actually a very interesting question because in truth, in 2021 to '22, '22 to '23, maybe '23 to '24, we can debate, you're going to see a natural level of double-digit growth as a function of physical return. And obviously, what we want to do is we want to take an unfair share of that. That was my point at the end, plus begin to layer on growth in other services. So what would we expect to see if that plays out by the time we get to '24 into '25 and beyond, you would expect, if you like, the normalized rate of growth to be 5% plus and then what can we take in digital services and then you get to a view as to what your compound revenue growth rate could be. So we think there's a real opportunity in the B2B markets because in one of those areas, we're not -- we are taking some share of budget. But I think Charlie, Gary and Andy would agree with me. It's nominal by comparison to the size of that addressable market. Do you want to comment on the GAP budget versus organic?

Yes. I mean I think with the GBP 150 million of net investment over 3 years, I think if you do the modeling, you can clearly see, we can forward that and fund that out of free cash flow. And so to the point of your question, we see the 2 things as being separate. So the divestment and redeployment of capital would be separate and above and incremental to the GAP II program and the returns we think we can generate from that. In terms of the valuation, multiple point on the sum of the parts, I mean there's a wide range of outcomes, the wide range of numbers in people's models and the people assume. But if you look at the average overall and the general range, I'd say based on the 16, 17x we've achieved and what we look at in terms of the business and the prospects of the businesses, we're confident that we can beat those numbers. Clearly, we're not going to sort of pretty just our -- commercial negotiations or declare our hand on what we think they're worth. But as I say, we're pretty confident we can exceed those numbers.

Content. Question here.

Can you -- just on the digital demand generation. So kind of a new initiative. Can you just talk me through the view as the sort of key competitors in the space? It seems like that's quite a broad market. I mean now it includes sales force in there as potential given the growing CRM. Am I thinking about that the right way? Would you view as the key competitors you're looking to take business from?

Well, Max will get into this when he talks about what we are building alongside IRS our data engine. But you're correct, the challenge with defining that market, if you're looking at it for the first time, is the range of players in that market, providing services are many and various. So it's very distributed. The place where you probably see the cleanest competitors is in the tech market because the technology market, the enterprise community in that market, the vendors, the buyers, the platforms, the providers, even the service providers have a very developed buyers of digital demand and buyer profiling services. So therefore, probably the lead competitor to Informa Tech and that would be tech target, thank you having a mental blank would be tech target. And there are probably 2 or 3 other players in -- who specialize in that end sector. Beyond that, you've got a whole range of some of the software service providers. You've mentioned one. There are others. And then there are a series of specialists who are small scale and then 2 or 3 larger players who have built platform capability, particularly around intent and lead scoring. That's probably -- I don't want to get into naming company names because that then leads to the obvious next question, if you'll forgive me. Next question? Turns really back of 2, 2 up on the mezzanine.

So I had a question. Why exactly like is there a plan to buy back the shares? So obviously, like there's a short-term positive effect in terms of like consolidation and increasing the equity value. But like how do you think it's going to play in terms of like long-term growth for the company like buying back the shares?

Well, I mean, our judgment at the moment, and obviously, all of this is subject to us completing the process is that slightly, your question is slightly connected to Nick's third question, which is what will be the achieved multiple or ultimately value of these businesses? But our judgment is that we're sufficiently confident that the likely inflow of proceeds will provide us with enough firepower to strengthen our balance sheet, make the investments in the sort of businesses and other businesses that we've just been talking about. And it makes sense so there's a little bit of softening of that EPS bridge and some form of special dividend probably also with a consolidation on existing share count. And if we get the timing of all that right from a -- if you're looking at the business through into 2022, then hopefully, the -- that's the thinking. Now obviously, all of that is -- comes with 1, well, 2, I suppose, health warnings. The first is we've got to complete the process. And the second is you'll always have an eye on the share price. There was another question or 2 other questions up on the...

We deploy the capital probably with M&A. Could you tell us a little bit about how the market is looking like for, first of all, traditional events business; and secondly, for more digital play? And the second one is, obviously, Informa would be very different 2 to 3 years from now. How do you think about the right amount of leverage to put on the company given maybe a more volatile cash flow profile?

Even sort of consolidation, if you like, or acquisition. We have, in fact, just completed one in the beauty portfolio. It's in our announcement today, which you'll have seen. Premier, which is a very nice brand, which sits very comfortably with the rest of our beauty portfolio, servicing the professional salon and professional salon care subsector for the way we will think about it going forward, which is how do we add brands to sectors where we've already got a market position. So building our specialist strength. And we're reasonably confident that those opportunities will continue. And as Gareth said, part of our thinking is it allows us to recycle higher value returns from the divestment of intelligence into lower multiple acquisitions or B2B market services and in academic market services. Actually, the market has stayed relatively constant, I would say, through COVID, both in terms of volume of inbound and valuations. I don't think there's been a material change in that we've seen. I'm not sure I would agree with your word volatile. I mean, you might say, hang on a minute, all. But I take the point that it is less subscription-based. In B2B markets, although part of our thinking around diversifying the revenue mix into digital services alongside physical services, is it softens some of what you describe as volatility. On the leverage question, we haven't. And the Chairman is sitting just along from you, I think 3 and a bit as long as we could see it delevering. I think in my conversations with shareholders, that tolerance has come off a notch. But I caveat that with the fact that if our leverage have been 0.5 turn or even a turn lower going into COVID, it would have made precisely 0 difference. So we haven't had the conversation. We haven't come out with a leverage policy.

On Omicron, a new variant, I mean, it looks like you basically have assumed those are not really a big issue, so the planning for today hasn't really changed since the new variant came out. And in the plan, you were obviously not assuming any damage from new variants if you can just confirm that. And then do all they don't many fed together because it seems like they kind of don't really. And then on the final thing, you mentioned in the new normal section for 2024, there's a bit of bolt-on M&A coming in there, so I think it says GBP 100 million a year. In your subject to that, when does the GBP 100 million per year M&A start?

In the mutation or development of the virus. And I -- it's not our place, I think, to comment on that in -- on the science or on the public policy and our position on COVID throughout has been we'll follow the guidance from governments. The build that we are working with has got business to do and the product services those customers. Does the impact of a new variant? We're currently all living with Omicron have an impact. Of course, it has an impact. And in some places, that has resulted in things that we would have run not happening. But in the main around the globe, the world has found different ways of continuing to trade and continuing to have commercial activity. So you're correct, Matthew. Our planning assumption but the trend line and the underlying structural value of the product, we feel very confident about. I don't really know how to answer your question because I don't agree with it to your second question. I think it's -- it doesn't recognize because it's no different from the question that we used to get asked at these events about why does academic markets, business intelligence and B2B Events sit together. And I've always said the same thing, and you've heard me say it before, there are 3 reasons. The first is there are all businesses providing specialist knowledge and information to end markets, different end markets, but specialists knowledge and information to end markets. They all require expertise and knowledge and skills, which are very relevant to that. And you have to be able to create a culture and both commercially and environmentally where the people who work in those businesses want to work in them and working them and do well. And if you get that right, it makes a lot of sense to have those businesses in the same company and the same culture with the same commercial, entrepreneurial attitude to how do you create an environment where people with that level of specialist smarts want to go about their daily life. And I think the question is, it's only when you can't do that well that you ask yourself the question, why do they hang out together. And that's, I think, been our consistent approach. On your bolt-on question, I'm assuming the answer is yes.

2022. Yes.

2022, yes. I think it's yes.

I mean at GBP 100 million a year, we can fund that to start with our free cash flow.

Yes. Next question. Sorry, was there somebody else up on the mezzanine, you had a question? Yes, there's a question here in the middle.

It's Fiona Williams from Nuffield Medicine. Just a couple. Is that actually now operational? And what benefits you already see probably if it is? And the second question is about your sustainability commitment. Could you explain how that interacts with your M&A strategy? Do you look -- the people are already playing or people who bring on the journey.

Great question. Let me take your second question first, then Max, do you want to give a teaser on the first.

At last the whole presentation.

I think the definition of a teaser is could you answer Fiona's question in short and compelling form as opposed to just saying if you just hang around, I'll give you all the answers.

I could.

Are you ready? Or do you want me to...

No, take the second one.

I'll take the second one. He's going to warm himself up Fiona. Yes, 100% it is. I mean, sparing Ben's blushes, who's been leading the charge, we now have, I think, a very professional in-depth team in our sustainability area, which has, I think, got enormous respect around the business. I think my colleagues would say that. And therefore, it has become an integrated part of the way in which we do business, including M&A. And so as you would expect, we've got a whole raft of criteria that we use to judge M&A. One of them slightly goes back to Matthew's question, which is one of our criteria is people. Will it fit? Even if the business looks like it fits with your sector or your end market, are these a group of -- is this a culture that you can see thriving inside Informa? Or is there going to be some organ rejection. That's a big and important criteria for us on M&A. We've said no to many businesses, not because they're not good businesses, but we don't think they would fit. And absolutely the same would be true. And it's Informa sectors that we won't go into. It's Informa businesses that we will not do business with. It's Informa sectors that we've exited. So it's a very integrated part of our business. So I think we feel very clear about that. Max, in 20 seconds, give us a teaser.

What was the question. It is operational. We are delivering value to their existing business, and we are also delivering value in audience development and digital demand generation. I'll take you through the detail. Stay tuned.

I'm glad he said that because we spent a lot of money on Max. I'd be really disappointing, if he's answered to you, it was actually we haven't really started yet. Next question. Richard, do you want me to take any questions online?

I mean there's a few come in. I'll just read out maybe a couple because a lot of them, I think, will benefit from the second half and just more detail on the thing. There's quite a lot of questions on process around divestment. Are we already speaking to people? Where are we in the process times? But also are there any dissynergies from the divestment in terms of things like tax and costs and so on and so forth? I might want to talk about. And then second question, maybe just to feed off an earlier question. Are we still committed to investment-grade ratings from one of our credit observers? And given the divestment, how might that impact it?

Okay. Great questions. Why don't we take those. Should I speak to processing, you speak to dis-synergies and credit rating agencies. I mean, no, we are not engaged directly in any conversation with any party prior to today's announcement. We have, as I indicated in my presentation and Gareth underscored, we have had some significant inbound interest for brands in the portfolio. We will lay out the approach to that process. We are working with advisers on that and we would expect that process to kick off in the new year. We have had the advantage of thinking about this. And again, partly to answer Matthew's question, we have gone around the -- does the latest vary and change our view. It doesn't change our view. We see this as a strategy for growth for the next 3 to 4 years. And that means that we are quite prepared in how to take these businesses to market, and that's slightly informing our thinking that we would like to crack on with it through 2022, and the summer seems like a sensible checkpoint potentially for completion. Gareth, do you want to take the dissynergies and investment grade?

Yes, on the dissynergies point. I think where I'd start that in terms of the answer is that, as I said in my speech, this is fundamentally a growth story. It isn't about the group becoming a smaller group. We're looking to transition out of the divested assets. We won't complete the sales until the summer of '22 at the earliest. Then we'll probably be on some sort of transition services agreement or I don't know, it could be up to a year. And if you look at how we're going to start to redeploy the capital, I think that as the business is beginning to leave the group, you'll start to see new businesses coming into the group. And this is -- fundamentally, this is not about the group getting smaller. This is about a change in our approach and focusing on our market leadership positions in the businesses, in B2B Events and in Taylor & Francis. So I think in terms of dissynergies, we'll be very focused on that and making sure they don't occur, but in the first instance, that's not how we're thinking about it from a group point of view. On investment grade, I do understand there's some questions there because obviously, we're coming out of some markets, we're coming out of some subscription products. But obviously, we'll be going to new markets, into new products. And therefore, I think there is definitely a conversation to be had with the rating agencies, as this picture begins to evolve to see how they view that trade-off and how they see that working because they certainly value diversity in geographies, diversity in products, et cetera. And that's going to change a bit in the mix, but I don't think it's going to really restrict or contract as we go through the growth acceleration plan. So it's something to feel our way into. Allied to that is the point earlier around leverage. As Stephen said, we're not looking to increase leverage materially in the business going forward. And certainly, those numbers aren't put up just joining the dots. Those numbers are put up around GBP 3.3 billion of revenue. That does not have the leverage above 2x. So the leverage is staying below 2x in the mix. That's kind of how we're thinking about it. But as Stephen also said, it's definitely an emerging view that we haven't finalized our position on with the Board yet.

Okay. I'm going to call it a wrap -- sorry, a burning question in the last room. Last question, just to put the pressure on.

Just reflecting on the time line of the disposal on business intelligence. The multiples you get in that space are quite sensitive to the level of organic growth you're generating, the customer churn. How do you think today's announcement affects customer retention, organic growth and organic investments within that business?

Patrick?

I mean, as Stephen said earlier, we've got a very good view of coming for 2022. The ACV in that business, the contract value is continuing to accelerate this growth, which is to deaccelerate. Our renewal rates are over 90% and our new business rates are as high as they've ever been. So I don't see so much impact from that. Our products are world-leading products, leading data sets, I don't see it really.

There is also some logic in the timing of the announcement. It's very relevant. We have a very high degree of confidence in where the renewal cycle is. Okay. Thank you very much for those of you who've attended in person. For those of you who have attended on the webcast, I hope the production quality was good. I'm getting a thumbs up from the production team, but they would do that, wouldn't they? We're going to take a break for 15 minutes, which on my inefficient watch says that we'll be back here at half past the hour, and we'll be restarting on the webcast at half past the hour. Thank you very much. [Break]

We can regather in the room. And thank you very much. I hope everyone got a chance to grab a cup of coffee, cup of tea and ask the questions that you really wanted to ask. And welcome back to colleagues and guests on the webcast. And we now come to the second half of Informa's Capital Markets Day, where we want to really, in this session, try and bring to life our growth and acceleration ambitions in what will be the 2 growth engines of new Informa, our B2B markets businesses and our Academic Markets business. I'm joined on the stage and as presenters by 3 colleagues who'll be representing many thousands of other colleagues, but 3 colleagues. Charlie McCurdy, who is familiar to many of you, who I think is fair to say is a legend in his own industry, has been with our company for over 6 years now. He has led the creation of Informa Markets from really an idea to being a leading player in its industry. And Charlie is going to bring to life not just what we're doing in Informa Markets, but what we're doing more broadly in B2B markets and why we're so excited about those growth opportunities. He'll be joined by Max Gabriel, who joined our company a few years ago. In fact, Max has worked in, I think, 3 different roles in the time he's been in the company. He keeps being poached. It's like an internal transfer market in Max Gabriel. He joined initially to help me in group, think about what we were doing in all things technology. He then went to work with Annie and colleagues in Taylor & Francis and he now is part of the B2B markets team and has just recently become the President of IIRIS, where reassuringly, we discovered in the last session, they are actually doing something. And Max will bring to life what's happening with IIRIS, our new data engine. And then last and certainly not least, and for those of you who've not seen Annie present, I promise you this will be the highlight of the day. Annie joined our company 4 years ago with a very clear brief, which is we've got a great brand, we've got a great business, we've got a fabulous culture and we've got a marvelous reputation and an enormously rich content history and back story -- I'm not allowed to say the word archive. But this business needs bringing into the 21st century. And Annie will help us do that. And she has been a force of energy, excitement and progress. And you'll see that, I think, in her session. So I hope you enjoy the session and then we'll have a Q&A at the end. Charlie, the floor is yours.

Thanks very much, Stephen. Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us both here in the room and online remotely. I'm going to do my best to show you where we are right today in our business and where we're going to be taking the business. I will be joined, as Stephen said, by Max Gabriel, who will go into the IIRIS data management and data engine activity that is so closely linked to what we're doing across our B2B businesses. And in that regard, what I will be talking about is Informa's overall B2B markets and digital services business. These are -- they're currently performed through 3 distinct divisions of Informa, there's some Informa Markets, which I'm running and which is mostly known for its large exhibition business and digital services capacities and capabilities. Informa Connect is run by Andy Mullins, who is with us today here, which is known for its content-led events activities, both face-to-face, hybrid and virtual. The third area is Informa Tech. Informa Tech is run by Gary Nugent, also with us today. And this is a freestanding unit that's exclusively focused on the IT sector, which is very advanced in its practices and Gary and his team present quite a broad array of services in support of various IT markets that we'll get into in a little bit more. Now while these are quite distinct businesses the way they run, they do enjoy a lot of commonality as to the themes and the platforms and the data management, sustainability practices that we're leveraging across the enterprise. So where are we in the Live Events business, starting out with this. This is a slide you saw previously from Stephen. So what we have in the Live Event business is this year, we've been really quite active, quite busy. And all in all, quite successful for the face-to-face event business. We've conducted over 300 events around the world in 30 countries. Attendance has been very healthy in volume and also very much in quality, very motivated buyers coming to our events and presenting very effective business to the exhibitors and sponsors at our shows. And as a result of all of that, our exhibitors are very encouraged by this through their experience this year. And you can see that coming back in the form of the kind of rebook and contracts coming in, in advance of just looking at the next quarter, the first quarter of next year. It gives us a high level of confidence that we can get to a kind of 70% relative performance to 2019 revenue levels. And over on the right, the 75%, they're backing this up, their contracts, with very healthy cash advances in keeping with past patterns. So the strong indications of intent from our exhibitors as well. And we'll get into that. Now focusing now on the -- what we call our power brands. These are our largest events across these 3 divisions. It's interesting to see the pattern around the world, and I'd like to just focus on that for a minute. You can see on the left, in Mainland China. Mainland China, we actually started trading with live events in June of 2020, 1.5 years ago. And as a result, this year, we've had a full cycle of events. We've all been on cycle and they usually date patterns. And even without international participation because of the border restrictions there, we're trading at over 90% revenue levels relative to the 2019 levels. It's quite a different story in North America and in the Middle East, where we just came back to live events and volume in June of this year. And many of those summer shows this year are normally winter shows. So we are off cycle. We thought it was important to come back to market in any case. And overall, as a result, we're seeing year-over-year full year comparisons of same events around 45%, 50%. I will say though that the trend that I see from June through the end of the year is toward an improving performance relative to 2019. And Europe is actually a different story. In Europe, we were pretty dark until September, where we came back in earnest. We're very happy with the performance across our European base shows. What we have seen is that some shows that are really highly dependent on out-of-region exhibitors, in particular, China and India, has reduced volume there this year. So we're trading at around 55% of previous levels. And lagging the other regions is the ASEAN and Hong Kong territories, which are quite affected by border controls and transit restrictions and quarantine requirements, which is resulting in a sub-15% kind of performance this year compared to next year. Overall, this adds up to -- on a lot of different stories adds up to something over 50% performance of these power brands this year compared to 2019. So what are customers saying? This is mostly talking to exhibitors. And they're basically saying what they have said in the past about participating in live events and exhibitions. They're finding access to strengthening bonds with existing customers. They're out face-to-face, grooming new customer relationships. On the one hand, on the exhibitor or sponsor side. And on the attendee or buyer side, they're saying, once again, we can get back to finding fresh suppliers, new suppliers to address new urgent needs in our business to stay growing and stay competitive. These are all the things that people say about exhibitions all along, and this is exactly the same experience now. It's just much more intensely concentrated given the urgency of post-COVID come back to markets for our customers. So we are also experimenting, as I'll get into, with some smart technology to deep and broaden the impact of these events. Now this is -- I'm going to reappropriate this slide because it is very pertinent as we've had -- a lot of uncertainty has risen in the last few weeks owing to the progression of COVID and its variants. I think while that's all been happening, in fact, this week and looking back 3 weeks around the world, our colleagues have been extremely busy. Our customers have been extremely active in, what is it, it's 21 events in 16 cities in 8 countries all the way from San Jose to Shenzhen. Business is going on in face-to-face events. This is sort of like a -- in the lockdown here, we had a concept of essential worker. These events are essential events in these businesses and people need to be attending them. This has added up to about GBP 60 million of revenue. And a revenue performance relative to '19, which is the most valid reference point of over 70%. So this is a healthy indicator of the need for live events through this year going into next year. So let's look for a minute now. This slide, I think, encapsulates pretty well our strategy and the way we go about executing across our B2B markets and digital services businesses. First of all, we have an intense focus on these 8 core primary specialist vertical markets, all the way from life sciences and construction and manufacturing to tech and finance. And each of those has its own subsectors where we focus our efforts. And many of those subsectors have their own subcommunities. And that's the level at which we really engage and bring benefits of content flow and commercial flow in these markets. And across all of these, as I mentioned earlier, we're finding increasingly the ability to deliver common and scalable platforms, common and scalable data management, and common and scalable sustainability practices that we're quite advanced on. So what's an example of this? This is the same 8 primary verticals. The space is relative to their revenue in 2019. And I'd like to focus for now on the tech market. As I mentioned, the tech market that Gary runs is -- the Informa Tech is just focused on IT and it goes deep into IT in this way. So the tech market itself is divided into a variety of very attractive subsectors such as cybersecurity, such as entertainment, and such as enterprise IT. And if we look deeper into enterprise IT, these are the subcommunities just within enterprise IT, and they're quite distinct the way they define themselves and in the way we deliver the kind of services to them to support commercial activity in those markets. And across these, we're delivering services that are digitally-driven, that are events-driven, that are research-driven. It's the way in which we kind of surround these markets with services and have a clearer view of the activity in these markets than any one player in those markets. So that's the way in which we conduct our business at the specialist level deep, deep down into communities. As Stephen said, I'd like to just step back and look at the first GAP period, the 5 years from 2014 through 2019. As you can see, starting out back in 2014, the B2B markets activities were really between Informa Connect and what we call Global Exhibitions. And actually a majority were conferences back then. Through a process of very select and strategic acquisitions that many of you followed over the years, we've been able to expand to become the world's largest exhibition company. Back in when I joined Informa just over 6 years ago, I met with the Board and I said, what I want to do is develop the world's most valuable exhibition company. And with their support, I think we were able to do that. And just in terms of scale, I will also say, in my opinion, we're also the most effective exhibition live event organizer at scale out there. At the same time, in the background, we've been developing this whole vertical market focus. We've been fostering our digital and data capabilities. We've had an underlying growth rate that has consistently and overall beat the overall events industry. And we've developed, as Stephen mentioned earlier, the seeds of our sustainability program that is bearing a lot of fruit for us right now. So that was the first GAP. Well, on GAP II, we have a new ambition now. I think that ambition is not only first of all, to manage the scale restoration of the live event business, but to develop alongside that and closely allied to that, our digital services that together add up to this very powerful Market Access business where we're finding many ways to find suppliers access to buyers and find buyers access to just the right kind of suppliers. With the talent and resources, we will be investing in technology through the GAP II program. We have a strong core of digital and data talent, not only in the IIRIS group, but in commercially. Over 40% of our colleagues in the United States, in fact, our -- their full-time job is data -- is digital services, where we have a strong base. All that leads to a growth program that we expect -- fully expected by 2024 to have a substantially meaningfully higher revenue profile than in 2019. But also importantly, the mix of that revenue is it's more resilient, it's more powerful. It has a greater span and it has greater underlying growth characteristics. So that's the growth element. And on the returns specifically, the GAP II investment that Gareth introduced is largely focused on driving that 25% of total revenue in 2024 coming from digital services at substantially higher percentage than it is now. So let's look at that in terms of the financial profile. This is just the B2B markets element of the company. I think, Gareth, you walked us through a group-wide one. We have had a small program on the upper left there of exiting some low opportunity, low-margin events last year. In the dark blue, we're seeing by '24, a substantial return overall of face-to-face events to their level in 2019. And the green bit, which is our digital business, it was meaningful in 2019 overall. You can see actually in this transition period, it's actually grown. And then from that base, we see an opportunity to expand up to in '24 in that range of 25% of total revenue coming from digital services that we'll get into more detail in a moment. And that overall is what's driving the scale of the business, is driving the quality and resilience of the earnings and revenue and it provides us with greater underlying growth. So how do we go about this ambition of becoming a world leader not only in events, but in Market Access services? Well, this is it. It really -- it breaks down into these 3 parts and deceptively simple, I would say. The first element is this -- is the face-to-face event business, which was severely impacted for all the obvious reasons and is at a point where we're seeing the demand in the marketplace is giving us a very high level of confidence for the kind of return that we discussed. The second point is what we're calling Smart Events. And this is 2 very related elements. One is by using the kind of digital capabilities that, in part we learned during the course of the shutdown, we're able first of all, to make the live event experience much more powerful for participants, for preshow services, for at-show in-app services, for post-show analytics and this kind of thing, building up a much richer experience around face-to-face events. It happens that a lot of those capabilities also enable us to address not only the people who are in the venue during these shows, but the entire universe of participants in each of these subcommunities and market activities that if they can't get to the event, they can't exhibit or they can't attend as a buyer, they can still participate in that marketplace. So that it creates a whole expanded new market for us to play as a conference and content or event organizer as well as a face-to-face event organizer. And the third area of digital services. This is expanding on the capabilities we have now in a much more robust way given the kind of data overlay that we can provide, the insight and analytics as well as finding new ways in which to address customer needs, which amounts to interestingly, a way to address whole new budgets of our customers with competitive and valuable services. So going back to that first point, the rebuilding, the restoration of live events. I think we went through this with the -- what's going on right now with the year results, with the power brands, with the feedback from the marketplace. I think we're feeling very good about where face-to-face events are trending and heading back. So again, let's get it into the digital services part. I'd like to pause for a moment and just let's look at what do we mean exactly when we talk about these 3 elements. First of all, the Smart Events. Smart Events are -- these are the smart part of events. This is -- we're adding productivity and power to the experience of events, both for the people on site and for all of the much broader area of suppliers who are not exhibitors and buyers who are not attendees. Audience development. Audience development, very simply, these are content-led lead generation programs, and they're increasingly differentiated and enhanced by data segmentation and targeting. Digital demand generation, the third element here. This really boils down to data analytics that provide intent-based qualified B2B buyers and sales prospects to suppliers into markets. So let's go into these. The -- this is getting into the specific last 2 bits of digital services, audience development and digital demand generation. We were -- About a year ago, we were thinking this is a big opportunity. We have some know-how in this. We have some presence, especially in some sectors in the U.S. But we went out to our customers and asked them where are you spending your money overall and what needs do you have that are not being met right now? And this is what came back from hundreds of customers across the United States and Europe. It's interesting to note that sort of the -- an average CMO's view of how they're capturing interest in the marketplace. The bottom wedge there, the 5%, that's their share of their budgets that goes through within organizers. That's where our core business has been. It's a great business, it's irreplaceable, and that's where we've been. 6x that, 29% of their -- on average of B2B marketer's budgets for what they spend to go to market is actually in these digital services, audience development and digital demand generation. So we have a very, very small slice of that. And I think what we're seeing is the -- with our trusted brands, with our customer relationships, with the unique data that we have and insights we can provide, we have a very strong competitive edge and expanding in that bigger slice of the pie over there on the left. So Smart Events. I think I've covered this pretty well. It essentially boils down to starting with a great face-to-face experience. Adding to that, these kind of digital touch points that not only enhance the experience of a buyer preparing for a show, experiencing a show and the supplier, the exhibitor getting great analytics going after the show. But at each of these touch points, we're capturing data. We're capturing a sense of who's interested in what kind of products, what kind of activities, what kind of services. That all feeds into IIRIS and gives us more and more insight into the dynamics the market places. We've piloted these programs in Europe, in the U.S. And just tomorrow, we have our first fully integrated Smart Event program going on in San Jose, California at BioMed Device Silicon Valley. So that we're enhancing the live event experience, which also translates into our ability to open the aperture to a much broader audience in these markets. So that's what Smart Events amount to and for instance, exciting dimension of our growth going forward beyond the restoration of face-to-face events. On audience development, again these are the content-led lead generation programs enhanced by data. We have -- we're active in all these product areas at present, whether it's buyer -- product discovery services, content marketing, content and websites or e-newsletters, marketplaces. We're active in all of these areas at present. We do this quite well, mostly in the select group of sectors in the United States. And we -- as you'll see, we have the opportunity not only to raise the capability within these current areas, but also to proliferate these activities across many vertical sectors where we don't have much of a presence right now. So as we look at a case study or an example of what we can do as an audience development provider that coordinates with face-to-face events. So we have a -- there's -- I'm not supposed to say the name of the company. But this is a very large household name, multinational manufacturer and service provider that has a subsidiary that focuses not just on the aviation industry, but in the maintenance repair element of the aviation industry. They came to us and said, we want to grow our share in this market. We're having a hard time finding the program managers that we pitch our services to. Help us out. And our aviation team was able to come back to them and say, we have a database of the 40,000 people in the world who are program managers active in this space. We have a set of face-to-face events that they go to. We have content marketing and other audience development programs that we can deliver to them. And we will put that to work for you. We did that on a pilot basis. It came back very successful, which led to a multichannel, multiyear commitment on the part of this large German company for $800,000. And so what we're seeing is satisfied customers coming back and building up their portfolio with us even as we're, as Max will get into, we'll get into greater data management. On the demand generation, digital demand generation side, these are data analytics that provide intent-based and qualified and even scored sales prospects for suppliers. This is really getting into core data activities. And we have these face-to-face events that are becoming Smart Events. We have -- and that drives data into the IIRIS database as to market participant behaviors and intent and objectives. Audience development, millions and millions of touch points that are always feeding into the database. And all of that comes out to our ability to create these demand generation programs. And right now, we have it in 2 areas. One is in what we are calling Qualifi. This is our business that's mostly focused on B2B verticals for the Informa Markets space. And these are our proprietary intent scoring businesses using proprietary first priority data with some second-party data overlay to drive uniquely powerful scoring of leads in those markets. We have a good start there. We're seeing a very healthy renewal rate there, which gives us confidence in growth there. Today, we also announced, down at the bottom, NetLine, which has now become a member of our Informa Tech business. The IT market is by far the most advanced in these kind of DDG services, and that line is accelerating our capacity to grow in that capacity in the tech space. So with that, I'd like to, if I may, hand it over to you, Max, to get deeper into this whole IIRIS element, which is so central to the strategy. Thanks.

Thank you, Charlie. Good afternoon, everybody. I'm pleased to be able to unpack this a little bit. Before that, let me add a footnote to what Charlie was saying. We brought in a lot of product management talent over the past 2 years in the B2B businesses, that's allowing us to really reimagine the Smart Events experience as a product. As Charlie was saying, we are building on a very strong foundation of audience development. We're stepping the game up and then we are propelling our digital demand generation business. In the middle of it is IIRIS, what you have been hearing us. Data engine, I like to call it as a growth engine that sits at the heart of our growth ambition. I'll take you through a bit of a back story behind this, in terms of where did we start, what have we done and where we're going. Before I go there, as I was coming out to work today, my 17-year-old said, how are you going to open today? And I said, I'm going to say data is the new oil is going to be my starting statement. He said, don't do that. So why? She said it's -- first, it's unoriginal. Second, it's not an environmentally friendly statement. So I'm going to step away from it. I'm going to borrow Gary's statement. The whole thing is built on, as Gary would say it, we're sitting on a gold mine of first-party data, and that's the whole premise. I'll take you through where we are. And I hope my team will forgive me for this dramatic simplification of our landscape, the reality is it's a lot more complicated than that. We've always taken great pride in our first-party data. We have the volume, but we couldn't assess the value of it. We have the breadth, but not enough depth. We captured it very well, but we haven't nurtured it very well. So 2020, among many things, what COVID crisis revealed was these insights in our existing data sets. The good news was there were multiple programs within the 3 divisions that were onset to clean this up and set this out. And as we were running mass experimentation of virtual events, as you know in 2020, that gave us incredible opportunity to pick up very granular behavioral signals for the first time. So that opened up where Stephen, Gareth and the executive team said, look, we need to bring this together. We need to bring the capabilities from the 3 divisions into a single group and firm this up. Not to go back and streamline it, but really build a foundation for the future. And that's what we did. And the timing of it is quite interesting because it was a courageous move in the middle of postponement program, a cost containment program and a mass experimentation of virtual events. From day 1, the clock started, Fiona, we've been on it in terms of every pound that's been invested, how do we turn this into value. So past 12 months, we've been quite busy and the end outcome of that is we have about 1 billion audience interaction, which is a common definition within the organization. Whether it's a sign-up a download or a meeting connection, they're all audience interactions. So we managed to capture about 1 billion deep behavioral signals. We've gathered about 100 million unknown audience. So these have been scattered across hundreds and hundreds of websites. We've been able to capture them. This is actually a point of excitement for our marketing group because now they have one place to work on in a tactical way to start to convert them. And the ultimate output from this was 10 million, what we are calling it as known, we know who they are, engaged, they are actively engaged in our products and services and marketable, which means we have clear permission to market to them and we call it KEMA internally. Look, I mean, there were multiple variances of this that existed in the business. And the advantage of specialist business is everybody want to be slightly different. But we took this opportunity for the first time. We have a single definition of what do we mean by an audience. And we brought in quite a bit of discipline in terms of how we capture data, how we collect the consent so that it's privacy compliant, it's transparent to our audience and how we collect it. And one thing we learned is if you don't continuously enrich it, the data is now going to be of very good use. I'm sure you've seen many versions of this, but let me bring it to life what do we mean by KEMA. We've always been very good at collecting the demographics and thermographics information, who they are and where they work. We've been very good at it. We've done it a bit inconsistently. We launched a service called IIRIS Passport, which all of you had used it when you registered at our Capital Markets Day. It does 3 things: It simplifies registration; clarifies our consent process; and embeds tracking, so we can get into behavioral tracking. That's been -- that's what's been different this time. We're starting to capture very granular behavioral data, and that makes the profile more valuable. And along with that, we launched another service called IIRIS Recommend. And the purpose and objective behind that is as you collect more behavioral data, start to offer recommendations based on the behavioral data, which creates more behavioral data, thus increasing the value of the audience profile. On top of it, this is the part we are quite excited about, which is IIRIS Insights. This is what Charlie was talking about using machine learning and analytics. Now we start to compute value of intent, inferred interest, their goals and priorities, which allows us to measure the true value of the audience, which, to my point earlier, where we had the volume, we didn't have the value, and we want both. And that's what we managed to do here. There's a fourth service we launched, which is called Segment. And the purpose behind IIRIS Segment is our ability to drill down from that 10 million known audience all the way to an individual. That's a very powerful tool that our marketing team has for the first time and we're going to be enabling our customers to be able to do the same thing. So what have we done? We standardized KEMA. So there's a common definition. There's a single dashboard in the company. Any brand, any subsector can go see what is the KEMA number. And many of the -- many of the proactive ones in tech and other businesses, they've actually set themselves a very ambitious target on building that and growing that. We launched these 4 services. This was not done in vacuum. Each one of those services were built in coordination and collaboration with the commercial team. Put them all together, you've got a powerful proprietary growth engine, a data and analytics platform. And what I'm really passionate about is it's powered by some of the most committed, passionate colleagues that are trying to work together to make it better every day. And we've been very focused on not because Gareth wants us to, we've been very focused on how do we turn this investment into commercial value. And let me take you through 2 examples of what we've done. CPhI Online is our online product discovery, which is what our B2B buyers use, look up for suppliers of active pharma ingredients, suppliers of products. And when we rolled out IIRIS Recommend about 4 months ago, and what we realized was buyers were discovering twice as many products as before. We would have been grateful and satisfied with that, but it actually led to 30% more RFIs being submitted, this is request for information. The reason I want to call that out is that's a clear signal of intent. And our intent is quite fashionable these days. Every week, there's a new player coming in, claiming they can do intent. The only comment I would make on this is there are many players that are several degrees removed from the audience. In this case, unsolicited, unmarketed. A buyer is actually signaling they're interested in a product. That's really valuable, and we're quite excited about it. And that's why we're bullish on how we can build our digital demand generation business. The second example I want to talk you through is very foundational. It's got applicability across our business. We chose aviation because of the leadership, excellent brands, good quality content. And our hypothesis was, we're capturing all these behavior signals. If we use that to segment and run a campaign, this is going to have a better campaign performance. This is going to have better click-through rate. And the end result was, as you see, very promising. The click-through rate doubled up. More importantly, our content subscription, this was freemium subscribers converted to premium subscribers, so it was 4x the result. Before you punch it into any model, these are targeted experiments that we're doing, and we will be scaling this out in 2022. So we're quite pleased about the commercial value it's actually starting to add. In '21, while we are building the foundation, we've been very targeted where we actually execute this so that we can get the proof points before we can start scaling it. Key takeaway. Good quality content generates better engagement, sounds obvious, but now we have evidence to prove that, which generates more behavioral data, increasing the value per audience, which is one of our key metrics. I'll take you through what Charlie alluded to in terms of audience development and digital demand generation. Here's a real example, identity altered for obvious reasons. Silicon Valley start-up, let's call it Elsa. She is looking to create brand awareness of her antivirus software product, that's the goal, and create awareness for people who don't know about it and actually, people who are aware of it, let's start to nurture the lead. That's the goal. And a lot of these sophisticated customers, particularly in tech sector, they want a lot more data-driven approach than what we've done before, and that's why IIRIS is powering it. Alongside, she's also interested in finding out who is in market now to buy the product. And that's very important rich signal in terms of who's out there to buy, what is their buying cycle, who are the decision-makers. And we could get to this information in the past, now through IIRIS, we are able to pull it all together in one place through IIRIS Segment and Insights. And one of the additional commercial use case we did in '21 is the qualified business that Charlie was talking about. The qualified business was built on the premise of IIRIS supplying the data and analytics that was required for them. So let me bring it to life in terms of how would we help Elsa, who is in Silicon Valley. Here's Fiona, identity altered obviously, CIO of Financial Services. Here are all the information we know about her. She is an Omdia research paid subscriber. She attended a BlackHat event. She read articles on technical implementation of single sign-on. Interestingly enough, she downloaded a couple of white papers on competitive analysis on antivirus software. That allows us to build some interesting insight about the audience as a primary objective to help serve the audience better. As a secondary objective, we can actually help serve Elsa on the other side, right? And that's what we did. We can create targeted actions in terms of sponsorship, webinar and generating qualified leads for the supplier, which now we'll be able to do that scale because data has come together. And with the addition of NetLine with their background and their rich expertise, that's going to speed things up and put it in high gear. Let me give you a different dimension of it. This is -- we're quite excited about it. And you can see I'm excited about a lot of things here. This particular one is we've taken a different dimension of looking at a company. And the reason it's important is we've had -- it's not a critical point. We had a narrow view of exhibitor responses, delegates. Now we are looking at it as an individual and a company, right? That opens up different possibilities. Here's an example of a global media company whose colleagues around the world are downloading a report on market research from Informa Connect, reading about a sustainability article on Natural Products Insider, reading a cybersecurity article on DarkReading, attending our brand licensing show where they're actually sponsoring an event. We've had this information, but they were scouted. Now we have them in one place. This allows us to take a deeper view and build greater insight on the company, both on the buy side and the sell side because don't forget, everybody is buying and selling at the same time. So they are wanting something. So that allows us to build very targeted, unique account-based marketing opportunities. There a lot of players in this market. There was a question around this in the past -- earlier. And there are a lot of people that play in tech sector. Clearly, there's a lot of depth in that area. Other sectors are growing at the moment. But what's unique that Informa has is the cross-sector advantage because of the number of specialist brands where we operate in. That's a quick express tour on what we have done. It's been a busy 12 months. Moving into next year, '22, our plan is to double down on intent scoring. As Charlie was saying, we believe there's a competitive edge in terms of building a proprietary intent scoring. And then with the combination of Qualifi and NetLine coming together, that will give us a bigger boost in terms of building and scaling our digital demand generation business in '23. Alongside, we've been running some targeted experimentation on analytics-based products, and we hope to launch some of those in '24. So in summary, here's where we are, '21, 1 billion audience interaction, 10 million KEMA. We're using our existing value as a baseline. We hope to, by '24 triple that audience interaction, double the KEMA and then double to triple the value. That's why I do believe IIRIS sits at the heart of our growth ambition. Thank you. I'll pass it over to Charlie.

Sure. Thanks. Let me see if I can just pull this all together for you of what we've been talking about this afternoon. First, this is the passage from being the world's largest events company to becoming a world leader in market access across these channels, starting with the recovery and restoration of our live event business, we went through that. Through creating smart events that enhance the on-site experience and move us well beyond on-site experiences. And third, building upon our core capabilities in audience development and digital demand generation of using the kind of fundamental data-driven insights that we can provide uniquely to the marketplace because we are seeing what's going on in the marketplace. And I've done this in previous companies where it's exciting to see how the events and the digital feeds each other in the audience database and reinforces each other's growth rates. So this slide kind of brings it all together. We talked at the outset about how we go deep into primary vertical commercial areas and subsectors. That's -- there's a stack of our priority markets there for digital development. Each of those, we have very powerful and growing trade shows. You can see the audience development activity is robust at the level it is across those top 4 sectors in the U.S. And smart events, we've piloted in medical tech and IT and pharma. And digital demand generation, we're just getting started. We have the NetLine business in tech and the Qualifi business in medical technology. This is the way in which everything comes together to drive the business. And you can see all those purple boxes, this is where we see our ability to proliferate these activities across the portfolio. On the sustainability, I was asked to address the COP26 Conference in Glasgow on behalf of the events industry. And I have 4 very basic points. I think Informa is a leader in the industry, perhaps the leader in sustainability practices. Well, of 4 things. One is less waste with reasonable and nondisposable stands. It's energy consumption, renewable energy on-site and venue. It's carbon reduction through taking advantage of the fact that attending our events reduces the number of flights people need to take to get their work done. And finally, in terms of content and resource by virtue of the fact that we do hundreds of events around the world in many places, we can bring information and solutions to many industries in many places and solving their own sustainability needs. So summarizing all of this, I think we have all these different ways, a great opportunity to create value for this company. There's a return of face-to-face with organic and inorganic expansion, as Gareth mentioned. The Smart Event on site and beyond, the venue opportunity and the growth and proliferation of digital services and audience development and digital demand generation through the kind of customer relationships we have and the unique data capabilities we're developing to get into whole new areas of budgets that we're not really addressing in a material way now. And out of all that comes Informa B2B markets businesses that are emerging over this period of time as a leader in B2B market access, where we bring these markets together. Thank you very much.

Thanks, Charlie. Thanks, Max. I've always wanted Max to have a child called Angel so I could ask him how the Angel Gabriel was today. Was is Matt or was is Emma?

Emma.

It was Emma. Okay, so note to self, hire the younger Gabriel. So I hope that brought it to life what we're trying to do in that side of the business. In all 3 of those buckets, the return of physical, how do we move into smart events, digital, hybrid, immersive, and where can we find a legitimate place to play, and what do we need to build in order to be credible in digital demand generation. I know you've all got questions. You can craft those questions, same to guests on the webcast, because we're now going to change gear. We're moving to the other side of new Informa, to academic markets. And here, Annie is deliberately going to take us all broader, to give a sense of what this broader market is and why it is as well as what our ambition is over the next 3 to 4 years in academic markets. Annie, over to you.

Okay. Good afternoon. Feel free to stretch. I'm delighted to have the occasion to share once again with everyone my confidence in Taylor & Francis as a preeminent and highly sustainable growth business, but also to underscore the vital role that Scholarly Publishing is playing in the very best of what humanity has to bring, the brightest wisdom and the most collective progress. Here's what I'm hoping to try and do today, as Stephen just referenced. I'm going to start with our ambition and how the acceleration of our growth rate is underpinned by everything we're doing in the Knowledge Services business, alongside our traditional outputs of Books and Journals. Then with your indulgence, I am going to take a little bit of time to add what I think is some important context by bringing to life some of the macro environments and why the role we play in validating scientific data is more essential than ever. Something I know that many who are listening will understand intuitively, but truly to anchor our view that academic publishing is a highly sustainable business. And finally, I will bring it back full circle to the performance metrics we're tracking to demonstrate the success and confidence we have in the growth that's largely already being realized. Now T&F's stated ambition, to sustain our world-leading status, is one of only a handful, a very small handful of publishers serving the world's most forward-thinking specialists. These are the experts who possess the curiosity, the tenacity and the funding to drive this century's greatest innovations. Now since 2014, catalyzed by early funding from Informa's GAP I program, T&F has been advancing on a 10-year modernization program. The objective, to lay down modern technological and data-centric foundations and to realize scale around a broadening set of academic knowledge services. With digital foundations now largely in place and an early track record of success in achieving growth, we are now in a position to take a second tranche of GAP II funding to accelerate the growth rate further. Now this investment, in the range of $30 million or so over the next 3 years, and our accompanying operating plan, will, in fact, advance on 4 priorities around generating customer value: data; automation; researcher services; and personalization. Now as you can see, the next phase in our program will double T&F's growth rate while successfully managing margins. We've been a predominantly digital business for the better part of a decade, more so in recent years. So digital today is 83% of total revenue. But GAP II does enable us to build capacity in researcher services, which has a higher growth profile than the traditional librarian services. This change in mix in revenues will help T&F double the current 2% growth rate to 4%, while a modern digital architecture will continue to yield an efficiency dividend to help us maintain our OP performance. Now the T&F business model today provides fee-based services to consumers who produce and consumers who consume new advanced knowledge. I'm going to reference these as the pay-to-publish and pay-to-read models, respectively. Our pay-to-publish services earn fees upfront in exchange for publishing content, open for all to access freely. The pay-to-read model, T&F underwrites the publishing cost of new or curated content, and then we're reimbursed through a subscription fee. Now a very small cohort of customers, representing both the producers and the consumers, have hybrid service contracts. Many of you are familiar with these. And that's because they represent both the read and the published customers. But predominantly, these 2 models serve very different customers and are procured from very different funding sources. Viability in the pay-to-read model stems from the fact that knowledge is obsolescing today very rapidly, while new knowledge is becoming more complex. As a result, it needs to be updated more frequently and with greater speed and synthesis. So the pursuit of practical learning and application of knowledge is actually really vital for human progress. And therefore, T&F's pay-to-read model will work well in supporting the world's advanced learning programs. Our terms offer a multitude of flexible constructs around funding, bundling, sampling and permissions. Now accelerating growth in the pay-to-publish model stems from the fact that human knowledge is now estimated to be doubling every 13 months. As knowledge advances, it is being discovered with greater frequency by a larger number of researchers through increased funding from a more diverse cohort of funding sources with more outputs from both academic and nonacademic R&D centers and from a broader range of the world's geographies than ever before. So T&F is already delivering services around both of these business models, but the GAP II program will add scale in supporting growth that we are already realizing from the pay-to-publish model. Now as this chart depicts, the double-digit revenue growth that is accelerating in pay-to-publish services is happening through our open research programs. How are we achieving this? Certainly, I don't think anyone in academic publishing has put up numbers like this lately. Well, we're doing this by supporting the world's largest and most diverse composite of knowledge-makers and their peer networks, the communities that generate the knowledge, both inside academia and beyond, and by rapidly adapting to their service preferences. Building scale in our open research program represents a de-risked implementation, because these are outcomes we are already measuring and realizing. Our growth plan is predicated on maintaining the existing growth rates from both the pay-to-publish and the pay-to-read services. And we believe we will achieve this performance by serving a broader range of services to a growing and more diverse range of specialist communities, each showcasing their unique contributions to the enterprise of knowledge creation. Now as many listening know and understand well, to truly assess our performance capacity over the next 3 years, it's actually I think important to fully appreciate why this business exists, how we deliver sustainable value, and how our entire sector continues to authenticate the innovations that drive economic growth. So forgive me and allow me to add a little context by stating the obvious. Knowledge is power. We've seen its transformative effects most recently in breakthrough medical treatments for debilitating diseases like COVID, and in the technologies urban planners use to revitalize distressed neighborhoods. But left uncurated and unsubstantiated, this same power is lost and threatened by the ambiguity of a digital age, where facts are obscured by fallacies and where credibility is often uploaded rather than earned. Among the many endowments of the 21st century, we now have our own personalized printing presses. Some of you probably used it already today to instantaneously mass disseminate your opinions, outrage, even an occasional truth. And in many instances, outrage and opinions disguised as truth. This growing threat to the discernment of truth requires a higher standard of fact-based evidence protection, the kind that T&F and our publishing peers have been providing for nearly 3 centuries. As one of the world's most preeminent publishers, T&F is proud to reaffirm that as we continue to modernize, we remain steadfast and united behind our common purpose: to foster human progress by impartially validating and preserving the meaningful portion of the world's canon of evidence-based knowledge. From a meta perspective, the search for advanced knowledge persists as the greatest unsatiated need of the 21st century. The fuel, global R&D funding, which according to OECD, in 2019 was GBP 1.6 trillion and growing at 5% per annum. And just as Stephen said earlier, we expect the global knowledge economy to continue to outperform GDP in the digital age. And that is because today, over 1.1 trillion megabytes of random data emanate from machines all over the planet. A handful of leading researchers are processing the most promising bits, making it easier to analyze. Specialists are then applying modern technologies and methods as well as human judgment to composite and curate the best of this information and to convert it into new advanced knowledge. In this expanding landscape, a publisher's role as curator and authenticator is becoming more vital than ever. Publishing scale and importance in impacting societal progress continues to grow as subjectivity bias and fake information proliferates. The specialized expertise extracted from human intelligence will become ever more prized as these trends persist. So from our vantage point, championing the specialists inside the sweet spot of the knowledge economy continues to represent an enduring positive growth environment for T&F. As this slide depicts, pay-to-read taps the global library market of 40,000 academic institutions, managing GBP 13 billion in annual spend on academic books and journals. At the same time, pay-to-publish taps GBP 425 billion in academic R&D budgets, growing at 8% per annum, with over GBP 60 billion in new funding being allocated each year. And that's probably an underestimate based on the fact that the NIH alone in the United States, the National Institutes of Health, has a $42 billion annual budget. But let me be clear, we will never move away from our important partnerships with academic libraries. We're simply adding services in an expanding market, not replacing one addressable market with the other. Now some of you may have described this business, in fact, as one of Books and Journals. And clearly, these 2 distribution formats are still very popular among customers. But they are just that, formats, packaging, which does not convey the value embedded inside or the services rendered in support of its impact. So as you see here, many new services have emerged around knowledge production and consumption well beyond products destined for shelves. And in the coming years, the list of pay-to-publish and pay-to-read services will continue to grow. One very important fact to keep in mind is that knowledge creation is delivered by communities, not algorithms. Our unique validation process has persisted over centuries because it yields the greatest precision in the dimension and synthesis of facts. From the long tail, and you may not realize this, but from a long tail of over 5,000 credible academic publishers and another 5,000 or so that are not credible, but are still trying to serve the market with fake science, T&F is consistently positioned in the top 5, not in percentage terms, but in the top 5 of evidence-based publishers operating at a global scale. Our knowledge services model spans the full lifespan of careers dedicated to knowledge, and this is who we focus on. This is our customer. Let me share a real customer example. This is Rushi. Our relationship with her started when she first purchased our texts as an advanced learner in a leading academic institution and evolved with services that supported her ongoing research. In later stages, as her expertise progressed, we've added further support around book authorship, teaching and learning materials, peer review and further advanced research. Her published outputs, as you see on the slide, comprised journal articles, data sets, data notes, monographs, books, contributions to theme, digital collections, translated monographs, et cetera. Every single service node in her professional journey has been a value driver for both Rushi and for T&F. Giving students in the global workforce critical learnings is just essential to our mission as leadership in advancing scholarship from emerging areas, such as women's studies or nanotechnology. It's why our people are working nonstop to stop the proliferation of fake science that keeps the provosts and the deans and the politicians up at night, and why we're fighting to uphold the tenets of objectivity and rigor, so that the professors and the principal investigators who rely on access to a canon of authenticated evidence-based content, they can trust that content to progress science and knowledge further. We are unapologetic advocates and champions for this cohort, 9 million global academic knowledge producers. And we in our business model are placing not the content, but these knowledge producers, these experts like Rushi, at the epicenter of our knowledge services model so that the value of human judgment is never undermined or marginalized. Now through these trusted partnerships that often span decades, T&F has amassed an unparalleled corpus of knowledge, which extends to dozens of high-level subject domains well beyond what's depicted here. But the methodical approach to knowledge diversity is augmented by an equally purposeful strategy of increasing our capacity to curate on a global scale, irrespective of country of origin. Now below this surface of top-level domains is a much deeper range of subspecialties. The depth in social sciences and humanities, you can see here, with strengths in business, economics, education, communication studies, information science and political science. And just in our education domain alone, we've got another 21 subcategories below that and subspecialties below each of those. But if I zoom in a little bit more on the science, medicine, engineering and tech, you see topical areas depicted in proportion to articles published in 2020. And the specialty strengths include medicine, health, biological and physical sciences, engineering, technology and earth sciences, to name a few. At layers below are even deeper ranges of subspecialties authenticated by thousands of communities of experts and even more refined curation. The research has evolved to become feature-rich channels, not just an article, but data methods, meta data, supplementary materials, videos, 3D, and even code. As a core set of outputs, that modern research article continues to represent a vital proxy for impactful research, which successfully advances its field. Now to successfully curate this level of specialization, we deploy data-driven models to identify priority topics and researchers that funders are targeting to ensure these fee-based programs are adequately funded. As this slide depicts, aligned with each specialty, we track the value of all academic R&D, in funds and article volumes across hundreds of categories. This one in particular is around chemical engineering. You can see the $4.8 billion of active grant funding. And the chart on the right shows you the article volumes, which are growing at about 8%. And by looking at these data points in combination, we're able to prioritize customer research in areas where funds are driving article volumes. Mapping funds in this way is additive for disciplines, but it's also quite effective in emergent areas, where speed is an imperative. And here, this example shows smart cities, which is an emergent concept. You don't go to university to study smart cities. However, more and more higher ed institutions are now focused on it, and the grant values have been growing at 27% since 2017. We have over 180,000 smart city references in our corpus. And with a rapid build capability on our platform, we can offer a third-party pay-to-read collection of all of this content and deliver it dynamically. The Sustainable Development Goals online was a recent example we just launched a collection of curated content, developed in partnership with the United Nations. So this is the kind of pay-to-read service that we're evolving into. Gosh, I could easily fill up the remaining time talking about our modern digital architecture. But let me just use this slide to try and frame up maybe 5 or 6 of the highest level of priorities around our entire infrastructure. In pay-to-publish, the priority here, as I think Stephen has alluded to, is to enable the customers to expand with us around researcher services, and in particular, to track their flow of funds. The biggest problem in this business right now is the flow of funds and how they get to their destination. We have personalized dashboards to ensure customers can map their funds to the business models that they prefer, with the service levels and the customization that they prefer. We're scaling for speed and quality around the validation process to ensure authentication of evidence-based knowledge and through the strategic use of artificial intelligence. We're scaling for speed and efficiency and an optimized experience for these digitally native researchers, who are looking for speed and a frictionless experience to further their submission process and to do it effectively and with greater speed. And we're looking for data-driven analytics to optimize that customer experience and to really capitalize on the lifetime value of customers like Rushi. In the pay-to-read area, our priorities have been the enablement of rapid product builds, as I just mentioned, in these emergent disciplines, the enablement of multi-learning format types, because formats are obviously evolving beyond text, in areas such as audio, video data, code, et cetera, and the feature-rich optionality and self-service and 0 touch that we've all grown accustomed to in our consumer experiences, particularly for the Librarian services. Now leveraging all of these kinds of foundations, GAP II funding will further increase our scale, as I said, in Open Research programs. T&F is a very strong advocate for open scholarship, and we will continue to be. But Open Research is not a single monolithic service. Instead, it's a growing range, which includes open options in our subscription journals, publication in one of our 300-plus open access journals, preprint publishing, publishing with an open data policy or open peer review model, all of which are available on the F1000 platform, an optionality for specialists to make their books, data notes, research methods and other data openly available on our research platforms. Now on the upper right, you can see that F1000, the progressive open brand that we acquired nearly 2 years ago, is absolutely a core growth contributor to our Open Research programs and certainly our inspiration as well. And I say that because I can see Rebecca here in the audience. Providing greater speed, transparency, reproducibility in the publication of preprints, research, data notes. They've broken ground in every category here, with transparent peer review and fully open data. Not everyone is ready for all of these new service options. But for those who are the early adopters, we're there and we have these services. F1000 is also distinguished by a growing range of services for funders who prefer to publish Open under their own brand, which, again, is a more recent development. Now the snapshot showcasing our hybrid Read and Publish contracts on the bottom left demonstrates that while the pay-to-publish model has altered the revenue mix among this cohort of 30 or so customers, who have requested these contracts, overall revenue from this cohort, the growth in revenue has been sustained, and in fact, as you can see, is accelerating, as we find the flexible service models to adapt to their preferences. And that's the key to that cohort. So what does that mean? Irrespective of the regulatory environment, because I know we'll get this question, as the graph on the bottom right illustrates, Open Research, as Stephen mentioned, is an opportunity for T&F, not a threat. Roughly 80% of the revenue growth in research outputs is underpinned by article volumes. And we expect that trend to continue over the period. While we never disclose the growth rates, the margins, the volumes or the contractual terms around individual services or customers, this slide, as Stephen showed earlier, should offer, I think, some considerable assurance for those in possession of a healthy skepticism bias, which I would assume excludes no one on this call. The core philosophy which governs our interactions with customers is to accommodate their preferences rather than dictate our own. The truth is, as a service provider, we remain neutral on the mix of most of these attributes. Our success in retaining customers against the macro trends in the broader economy are evident, I think, in the mix on the left. If you look at the digitization and the service trends, these are things we're seeing in the broader economy. But we also draw confidence from our ability to add customers through new channels, geographies, business models, formats. And we've accomplished this growth by continuing to strengthen our gains, as you see in the upper center, from institutional funding sources, and delivering this entire set of evolving preferences while successfully managing operating margins. In terms of our contribution to Informa's sustainability program, T&F remains committed to supporting customer choice, as I just indicated, which means an ongoing commitment to print books in the many geographies, where spatial learning is still preferred. So we are staying committed to that format. But we're driving environmentally sustainable and operationally efficient practices, reducing the need for excess printing and warehousing, and moving on-demand printing closer to the point of delivery. On our journey towards zero waste, net zero carbon by 2030, we've successfully certified T&F's print books and journals carbon neutral following years of progress in reducing carbon emissions from our supply chain. We've also made remarkable progress in removing plastics from our print journals for the few customers who still request that format. 73% of the titles now mailing to our customers without plastic or lamination. And we're working with our suppliers to close the remaining gap by '22. We will also pursue carbon-neutral product certification for all platforms in '22 and all the remaining digital products by '24. Finally, ensuring the aid in the democratization of knowledge by helping remove barriers and connecting the disconnected, efforts that focus on enabling access to content and authorship for financially disconnected stakeholders and for those with accessibility needs. In fact, the results at T&F were recently ranked #1 in accessibility, and we achieved a gold ranking for our corporate accessibility statement in '21. And we have many, many colleagues who are very passionate in doing incredible work in this area. Stephen touched on this chart, so I won't dwell here. But I think you might appreciate if I give it a little bit of color around these metrics and what it will look like by 2024 in terms of driving our growth rate. So I'm just going to redraw it a bit. So you can hopefully see that from search engine optimization to research impact, each improvement in this chain represents progress towards our revenue goal. We do have further to scale, but each improvement in one benchmark enhances all subsequent benchmarks and the revenue growth which follows. Now all metrics have materially progressed since GAP I. Our performance starts with our Alexa Rank, as hundreds of billions of knowledge searches are initiated and started there every day. While our ranking will fluctuate, out of the 30 trillion or so web pages and out of the 2 billion subset of websites that Google indexes, we occupy a preeminent rank in the top 1,000. And we're #3 overall out of the top 50 global publishers. Our aim by 2024 is to occupy the #2 spot. Our ranking has improved over 700% since COVID began. And today, we're seeing over 60 million referrals a month from over 194 countries. And I think the UN only recognizes 193. I still haven't reconciled how we have 194. Strong referral traffic drives platform user sessions. And we expect a 71% increase by 2024 as more knowledge producers select T&F as their service provider of choice. Improved platform engagement scores will convert into a doubling of unique platform users by 2024, and in turn, to growth in article submissions for our pay-to-publish articles. We need 37% increase in submissions by 2024, and that will more than adequately convert into the article volumes needed to meet our growth target. And as I said, we're very much on target for that now. Now submissions drive growth in new content, new customers and greater impact through media and policy mentions from research. And these metrics in turn drive further submissions. Submissions also positively correlate to content downloads, and we will see those downloads triple by 2024. Growth in content views also translate into higher usage metrics for the institutional pay-to-read deals, which is why we're seeing incredible renewal rates in subscription revenues already secured for 2022. Well, I hope I've been able to bring to light today dimensions of this business. But on behalf of all of our colleagues at T&F, we are all working against an unprecedented societal backdrop of algorithms that are disseminating fake science and fallacies on a scale unprecedented in human history. This threat from undermining our collective ability to distinguish between truth and fiction, I don't think, is lost on anyone in this room. And this harmful lack of factual governance reinforces the need for human judgment and continued mediation of scientific validity, particularly around the facts that underpin the bedrock of human knowledge. These dynamics make T&F more valuable as a company. They make our sector more valuable and sustainable. And these trends will also serve as tailwinds for our growth acceleration plan. So in summary, T&F is a business where the market dynamics are healthy, where we are in a strong position to gain further advantage during this next period as publishing will continue to evolve as it always has through centuries. As our metrics demonstrate, T&F is growing in influence as a global knowledge brand. Curating a highly diverse specialist corpus provides us with, I think, the legacy of a significantly defensive commercial advantage, some risk mitigation. But also now, hopefully, you can all see growth from expansions in research funding, from expansions in formats, from business models expanding, learning modalities expanding, geographies expanding and participating. And the business is already in growth mode as our services continue to address the core needs and we continue to adapt to the preferences of customers. We're already achieving the growth rate required to realize our stated ambition. So look for T&F to remain very purpose-driven, very vital, and certainly in growth mode in the years to come. Thank you.

Thanks, Annie.

Right. Questions? Yes, gentleman in the back.

It's Rajesh Kumar from HSBC. The first one is on T&F. A lot of things you said I'm sure resonate very well with sustainability, ESG. It's definitely one of the high-quality publishers we know about. So a lot of things you said could have been said, say, 2 or 3 or 4 years back as well, right? This is one of the highest quality publisher out there. The business model adds value to the society. What has changed that has given you the confidence that by 2024, you would be punching 4%-plus growth? If I look at the metrics, your fastest growth, Open Access, would be growing slower on your own predictions in terms of percent growth rates. Yes, it will be a bigger portion of the pie, but the contribution growth from that, possibly lower. What are the headwinds which you currently have which would go away that could potentially lead to that growth? And I'm just trying to unpack Slide 99. And by the looks of it, Librarian versus Non-Librarian split, the way you're predicting, that suggests that quite a lot of that acceleration comes from Open Access and data services. So maybe it's been a difficult afternoon without enough coffee, I didn't get all the points through. And then I have another question on the previous presentation, but let's start with that one.

No. Let's take your other question first.

Yes. I mean just on the IIRIS data set, which you've generated. It's absolutely amazing. It's one of the probably best quality data that would be there for lead gen in the market. But it's reasonably untested. So you showed us a quite an interesting data point that your customers are spending 6x to money on digital channels compared to what they spend on events. So who are they spending that money with? And whose breakfast are you planning to eat?

Okay. Two great questions. Annie, do you want to take the first one first?

Sure. Yes. Great question. Thank you. There's an expanding market here, okay? So let's start there. We have to look at the nature of knowledge. Knowledge is speeding up. We have more data inputs coming in. So we're creating more knowledge as a civilization. And we're creating it faster and faster, right? And we're an engine that's actually authenticating, validating, substantiating that knowledge. So there's more demand for those services. If you think back a century, to the 20th century, right, you could essentially write the book on a particular topic, bind it up; it would take you several months, several years potentially to write it, and it could sit and stay highly relevant on someone's shelf for 50 years, and there wouldn't be much to update. Nowadays, there's a continuous cycle of iteration and updating and obsolescence, and it's all happening a lot faster. And so that demand to substantiate a larger pool of knowledge faster is what's really the tailwind driving the service model of pay-to-publish, which is an additional service and an expanded market segment that we are now addressing. And it's fueled by global spending on R&D. There isn't a country in the world now that isn't participating in that. If you go back to 1960, 75% all global R&D was spent in the United States. Now 75% of all global R&D is spent outside of the United States. And every country is a driver of potential economic growth. So there's just expanding demand for the specialist knowledge that validates, authenticates, synthesizes a larger corpus of knowledge. And that's the tailwind that's funding the expansion of our growth. Does that get to your...

It does. But it's a very top-down macro. I can see that's true for Elsevier or...

It's true for Elsevier.

What is specific to Taylor & Francis that you're doing that brings that out?

Well, it's not. It doesn't have to be unique to us. It's also unique to Elsevier. It's unique to that top tier that sit there, right? And we're all benefiting, I think, from that macro trend. What's unique to Taylor & Francis is that we have the world's most diverse corpus. So we're doing it with more communities than anyone else. We have thousands of communities. They're not as deep as the Elsevier communities, but they're broader, right? And so we all get at the top tier of that knowledge from different angles. We're the world's most diverse in terms of geography, in terms of disciplines and sub-disciplines, micro-specialties, communities. And the complexity delivering that kind of complexity at scale, where the micro markets are smaller, but you have far greater number of them and you have to adapt preferences, we don't say no to anyone. We don't dictate terms. We really can deliver that complexity at a very high degree of scale. And that's really the specialty of Taylor & Francis. We're operating in that top tier, but we're really the deepest and broadest corpus of all of them. I hope that helps.

Thanks, Annie. I'm going to come to your second question, just because we've only got another 20 minutes. Max, Charlie, on the IIRIS question? Whose budgets are we going after? Let's not name companies. Let's name...

I'll name one company. Google. You've heard Google? Google, by far, is the largest place where B2B suppliers are spending money in sponsored links and that kind of thing, by far. And otherwise, it's mostly legacy B2B media companies and then third-party data aggregators who gathered data from around various sources and come up with lead generation programs. I think what our advantage is it's first-party data. And all the touch points we have to be able to characterize who's inquiring what, where are they in the decision cycle, what's their budget, what's their spend likelihood. And I think that's what gives us a unique ability to expand our share of that market.

Next question? A question over here.

Yes. It's Nick from Barclays. I've got 3 questions on Events. So in your presentation, Charlie, you gave the example of Aviation Week being able to achieve higher subscription numbers from the data-driven work that you've done around your events. I mean you're planning to sell all of your subscription businesses. Wasn't there a linkage there that could have been made between the data of your events and driving subscriptions to Informa Intelligence? Second question. What can you say about your competitors in what they're doing in data offerings around events? If you look at events over quite a long period of time, people have been talking about doing digital things around them quite a lot. It's kind of turned out to be a hygiene factor that you just kind of have to do it and don't really charge any more for it. So if RELX exhibitions, they do all the stuff and they don't charge anymore for their stand, do you just have to do all of this and don't get paid any extra for it? Is there a risk that it doesn't generate that extra revenue? And third question, just on smart events. Can you give a kind of broad example of where someone is paying for a stand without any kind of preshow discovery or post-show analytics, but then if they do pay for those things, they pay more for a stand-alone? You said 20,000 before. Is it 22,000 if you pay for the smart stuff?

Charlie, why don't we tik-tak-tok on this. I'll come in on the first question and half of the second, and then you can take half of the second and all the third?

All right.

On the first question, there is no operational connection and never has been between the brands, the markets and the categories that we serve in Informa Intelligence, and the brands, the markets and the categories we serve in Informa Markets or in Informa Tech or in Informa Connect. Secondly, they're not the same buyer by category. So even if we were in the same markets, we're not dealing with the same buyer. And thirdly, they're not buying the same services. So there is no linkage. And we've never run them to have any linkage. So there is no risk, and therefore, there is no loss. Our operating model as a company has always been, certainly in my time running the company, to maximize the operational performance of our brands and our businesses in the markets that they serve, and then to extract shared value on shared services. Not to run a complicated matrix model, whereby we try to create false connections between buyers who are buying different products or services that are not relevant to a category. So there is no connective tissue, so therefore, there is no risk. On your point on data and digital, I think you make a very valid point with that question. There is no doubt, and that was part of what I was referring to in my slide. Charlie, I think, will pick it up. On the future has arrived early, is that what COVID has done is it has made essential what you rightly pointed and that many people have talked about for years, which is an embedded range of digital services. Like in many areas, there is just going to be no going back. Customers are just not going to live without certain embedded digital services in their event product. That on a going-forward basis is a cost of doing business. I actually think that benefits the larger scale event organizer because you need to have a certain critical mass to be able to fund it, scale it, deliver it and keep it current. And that absolutely will become a standard cost of doing business. And that will require a level of operating efficiency that we've got confidence that we can reach over the period of this plan. The question is, can you put other services around that, which you can make incremental revenue on? And I'll hand over to Charlie to pick up from there.

Yes, sure. First of all, the face-to-face events business is a great business and irreplaceable. I think the smart elements are, we have to provide value. And the simplest example of this would be, in the proverbial fish bowl, an exhibitor would have 100 business cards. By the virtue of the data that we have as to who those inquiring people are, we can tell that exhibitor for a fee of where they should get to right away and call right away and who they shouldn't bother talking to at all. They don't have that any of that insights now. That's extremely valuable to an exhibitor, to convert the experience to have at an event to their sales organization and converting it to sales. It's all about delivering actual value, not saying we're doing something digitally and charging for it.

And do you want to address -- sorry, Max, do you want to add?

So just to add to that. I think one of the things we found out is our job used to be done at the events, and the customer's job starts. And I think that's what the audience development part of it would actually take those leads and start to build marketing programs, which actually creates more value.

And either Charlie or Andy, do you want to come in on the question around pricing around smart events? So in other words, how do you either reprice the booth sales, to put it simply? Or how do you end up with a rate card for additional services, which are smart event services rather than standard present services?

When we converted over to virtual events, a lot of the sponsors had a lot of skepticism about the efficacy of any of the booth or sponsorship activity they did. And we certainly provided them with these incredible reports of all the people interacting with them, interacting with their competitors, and managed to provide a whole bunch of data they never had before. Now in the short term, we use that to secure the pre-virtual event money. So the higher sponsorship money that we would have delivered for face-to-face-events. Moving out of it, we will be charging for all of those reports. Now people, they're on the drug now. They now know that anyone who turns up to the event, we can give them soup to nuts information about everyone who's been there, who they talk to, what they've done, what their interests are in. And there's a very, very high premium we could charge for those reports. Those reports are now being developed by Max, and they're going to be available across the whole of the Events business.

Okay. Charlie, anything to add?

Yes. Just a quick, and surprisingly. The answer is, we're still developing our pricing methodologies. And an advantage we have by having such a broad portfolio is that we can test a la carte pricing over here, we can test bundling pricing over there, and get a lot of quick feedback as to what works for customers. And we're right in the middle of that.

Okay. Nick, are you happy? Next question? There's one here and there's one up on the -- it's not my place to judge priorities on questions. That's a very dangerous thing to do in this audience.

You spoke about gaining unfair market share sort of thing. There are 2 questions around it. First, is there a focused industry sector, the 8 sectors that were mentioned and geography around them in terms of scaling up because you might not be as big in some of these sectors or geographies? And secondly, on the back of the earlier question, do you see an evolution of the industry where someone like Informa can offer an outsourced service for a go-to-market? Because I was looking at the pie chart, you're already serving a lot of portions of the go-to-market sort of exercise. And with IIRIS, do you see that evolution of you being able to offer a completely, as you said, bundled, an outsourced service to maybe smaller players or sellers who are looking for this sort of a service?

Interesting question. I mean I think on your first question, I would say, again, Charlie express your own view, but I think we would see geographically, at a macro level, if you overlay geography on that sector specialization slide of Charlie's, we would see North America and EMEA being our lead markets on multiservice deployment. Which is not to say that we will not do it in China or in ASEAN, but in chronology, I think it will be North America and EMEA. Would you agree with that, Charlie?

Yes, definitely. With the U.S. #1, where we're the most mature; EMEA, more in developing; and Asia has just very different agendas going on.

Yes. And slightly to connect to that question and one of Nick's earlier questions, it's definitely the case that in the U.S. market, the U.S. B2B buyer, the U.S. exhibitor is very used to buying and indeed paying for, albeit often from different people, multiple services. That's not an unusual sale process in the U.S. market or in parts of Europe. It's less usual in China or in parts of Asia. On your second question, I'm not sure -- slightly, again, building on Charlie's point about we're building our pricing methodology as we're evolving these products. I think what we would say is it will make us, I think, more confident about the incremental revenues that we can drive out of acquired businesses those are not adding those services, which is, I think, a slightly different take on your outsource point. Same principle, but I think we would apply differently. We have always, as a company, and this may be wrong, I don't know, but that's where we are, and I'm not sure we're going to change it anytime soon, we've tended to stay away from the managed service model. It's thinner margin. It's more complicated to operate. And it doesn't really play to what both Annie and Charlie have talked about, which is deep subject matter specialism. It just puts another distance between you and the market. Even where we have joint ventures, and we do have some, we tend to always prefer to be in the driving seat. I don't know, Charlie, if you want to add anything on that.

Yes. Just quickly, if you look at the, I think it's the third last slide, with all those vertical market sectors. Those are the priority markets. There are some that have shown much more promise than others. And we've identified them and are addressing them.

Just a quick footnote. If I understood your question correctly, during our qualified market research as well as customer conversation, they are the same problem. They want to sort out their customer data. They want better segmentation. So the demand is absolutely there. And Stephen is right. We wouldn't do it as a managed service, but actually, that's a great opportunity for audience development and digital demand generation.

Okay. Next question. We just have to touch more volume in just because of the win. There's a question up on the stage.

It's Matthew again from Credit Suisse. I've got 2 questions on T&F. The first one is, going back to the earlier question about the 4%. Maybe I got it wrong. But is it basically that moving from 2% to now to 4%, is that basically getting more revenue from Open Access publishing? I couldn't see an awful lot. I could have missed it around data services. So if you look at Clarivate or Elsevier's databases and tools, business, databases, et cetera, I can't see much of that in T&F. So is it correct that the movement from 2% to 4% is coming mainly from Open Access? That's the first question. The second question is, how much of the GBP 150 million investment is going into T&F? And what's the depreciation schedule? How many years is the CapEx in T&F going to be depreciated over?

No third?

No, that's it.

Okay. Gareth, do you want to take the second question? Annie, you could take the first?

Depreciation assumption across the projects is 5 years that we're assuming. I mean, it will be a bit of a mix depending on what we're doing. But generally, that's how we're modeling it out in terms of our figures. And in terms of the split of the investment, I'd probably say about 1/4 of it is going into T&F on the whole. But again, a bit of it's TBC, depending on what the investment counts or, et cetera, approves and runs with over time. But that's kind of a starting picture that we paint from.

Annie, on the first question, sources of growth?

Yes. Sources of growth are from the pay-to-publish model, which would include Open Research, of which Open Access is a component. We think of Open Access as really the Librarians view of sort of opening up the access. Open Research is -- you would see from some of these service tiers on F1000 and across the broader portfolio are really extending out the service level beyond just whether the content is published Open Access. There's a range of article types, broadening of types of data that we're taking in and publishing, and the expansion around an Open Research model that has services associated with it. So yes, that is the core thrust of the growth from 2% to 4%, is maintaining our strong position in Library services and expanding out to the pay-to-publish services. I'm not even going to attempt to compare what we do to another publisher. But I can say that we will really stay away from general reference content, of which I think a lot of -- the 20th century model was to put a lot of reference content in the database. The presumption was that if you put it in the database, it would have a long shelf life, and you could just charge subscriptions. And we're dealing with primary research. We're dealing with a fast and evolving, the most advanced, the most emergent knowledge, and not the reference knowledge that kind of sits out on the Internet now and is publicly available. I'm also not a big fan of the model of connecting the reference data to professional services, which I think Stephen alluded to earlier, is not sort of the ideal business model for us. But if you were buying those kinds of businesses, 10, 20 years ago, you want to maximize the output from them. And I'm not saying that they aren't good businesses, they don't map to our expert-centric model that we're focused on. We're focused on the individuals producing the knowledge, not on the knowledge itself, if that makes any sense. So I don't think they're comparable exactly, but it's really the model stemming from the continuation of primary research.

Thanks, Annie. Matthew, happy? Next question? Richard -- yes. A question in the middle.

Just on tenor front. Just given the proliferation of the knowledge you're dealing with, how do you scale the validation and the authentication that you've got to do?

Yes. It's such a great question, and that is what the GAP II, in part, will help us continue to do. There is a human element that we will never be able to move beyond. And there is a finite number of specialists in every one of these thousands of communities. So it's, a, managing the communities and their peer groups very, very well and very systematically, and using modern technologies, including artificial intelligence, including automation. It's the combination of those things, but it's not exclusively a tech play. So it's really the interplay between both of those things. There are many processes that we can improve, synthesis that we can improve, validation of elements around who the authors are, who their networks are, authenticating elements of the contributors, and some of the data itself, right, that we can use modern technologies. But we also still will continue to rely on human judgment. But it's sort of parsing that out, so that where you really need the human judgment, you have the capacity and the scale to do it. And you also have the deepest networks so that you can find them. And I think the other element that we're really excited about progressing on, which the industry historically hasn't done, is to be more thoughtful about how we continue to reward the loyalty of the engagement and the way in which impact in a modern context can be measured. Because historically, or in the 20th century, it was very limited, right? It was really exclusively by output. So we think that there are enhancements to every facet of this model. The core elements are still firm, are still sustainable. But there are enhancements that we can bring to this that will buy us more scale. And I would hate to go beyond that at this point. But hopefully, that gives you a bit of a flavor.

And given that there are so many variables that you're putting into the process, how does that reflect in the charging structure?

Well, actually, we're buying tremendous efficiency. So it balances out. There are areas where we are investing. But then there are areas where we are taking low-value activities that were being done by people, and we're automating them. So it's really the combination. There is a dividend, as I sort of indicated earlier, an efficiency dividend that offsets the increased investment. And I think for world-class publishers, the responsibility is to get that balance right. And that's what we're really successfully doing right now. Thank you.

Final question in the room? Richard? That doesn't mean you're allowed to ask a question.

There's quite a few questions. A lot has been answered, but 2, maybe 2 to follow on. One was around locations in relation to the B2B markets businesses, just around, in the past, we talked about certain municipalities, locations like Hong Kong, giving incentives to get events back going. Is that still happening? Do you expect more of that? And connected to that, the experience of COVID and the actions taken in some locations, things like border controls, does that change the way you think about some of those locations going forward? So that's one question. And then it wouldn't be a Capital Markets Day without a margin question in, because I know you're waiting for it. There's quite a few to thank you. But question is really just around pay-to-read versus pay-to-publish. Is there much difference in thinking about it? And then digital services versus traditional B2B events, maybe just a bit of color around how people should think about it.

Okay. Charlie, do you want to go first? And then Annie might come in on pay-to-read versus pay-to-publish. And then I will try and avoid the question on margins. Charlie?

Yes. The restrictions on crossing borders has been a lot less impactful in the United States and Mainland China because they're such big domestic markets that they can support very scalable shows. As I mentioned, the European shows have had a little bit of impact because of the border controls. And assuming, like Hong Kong, which is par excellence in international trade show destination, has had a very difficult year this year, and they have offered incentives. The challenge is using them because we haven't been able to host shows of scale this year. And quickly on the margin. I think we do have some advantage on the digital services in that we already have databases. We already have some content creation capabilities. So the contribution margin we're able to develop out of those tend to be a little higher than freestanding companies.

Thanks, Charlie. Annie, on margin or growth profile of pay-to-read versus pay-to-publish?

We don't have a monolithic service anywhere in the company on pay-to-read or pay-to-publish. We have tens of thousands of contracts. And every contract is unique to the service preferences, the service levels, and the tiering of what each customer favors and finds value in. And so we have models that really approach each contract individually. But we have a very well-developed sense of what our cost structures are. I think we've been very transparent with our customers based on the preferences that they indicate to us, what's important, and what the range of costs are for us in those models, and therefore, what the pricing structures are going to be. These are very, very transparent conversations, not in the aggregate, but each customer with T&F. And that's important to us because we want to build trust with those customers. So that is the reason why the margin is continually being successfully managed in the aggregate when you look at all of these preferences and all these changes. And it's true across the spectrum of pay-to-read and pay-to-publish. So the only thing I would nuance here is that in the pay-to-publish, there is a slight uptick from volume. So there is a very low single-digit drop in margin that's made up by the volume. And therefore, we still maintain in the aggregate if we were to sort of roll up all those individual contracts. But the bottom line is that every single customer has the right and opportunity to negotiate the preferences that they prefer, and therefore, for the rate to be dependent on those preferences.

Thanks, Annie. I mean the only thing I'd add overall, I mean, we've taken the view. Certainly, pre-COVID, I see no reason to change or post-COVID. The value in the company is directly correlated to revenue. And revenue in both of our businesses as we seek to diversify is directly correlated to relevance. And we have no doubt about our relevance in the core products and services that we provide in both of our businesses. But we're seeking to expand our relevance, and therefore, our revenues in new products and new services. We remain very confident that we will have highly competitive margins. But our focus is on building revenues and relevance, and then the margins will flow, but it will be in that order. And I think that's the right thing to do. Okay. I'm conscious we're 3 minutes over time, for which I apologize. Talking of time, I'm always struck by somebody famously once said, that time is one of the few free goods universally available to resolve. The only question is how do you choose to spend it. And for some reason, all of you in the room have chosen to spend it with us and a few hundred people on the webcast have chosen to spend it with us. And I'm amazed at how many have stayed all the way to the end. So I'm always appreciative when people are willing to give their time to understand our company better. We've certainly tried, and I hope we've been successful in laying out what we're trying to do with the future of Informa. We've got a very clear view about where growth should come from, how we accelerate that growth, and the markets in which we've chosen to do that in. As I was saying in the break with someone who should remain nameless, and there is no new news here, we are a public company, and therefore, we are doing this in plain sight. And transforming and diversifying your revenues and your products and services as a public company is a different challenge from trying to do it as a private company. But we are very, very clear that the path of future value, if you're a shareholder in Informa, is for us to see our core revenues return and to diversify our product and service mix in both those markets to drive incremental revenue growth. And that will be where the value lies. We did that in GAP I. We'll do it again in GAP II. We see ourselves as a growth company. I hope you understand that. I hope we've made it clear. I hope you've got some sense of our excitement about that. And most of all, I hope you're willing to stay the course. But thank you very much for coming today. Thanks for being on the webcast. And I look forward to continued engagement. Thank you.