So, good morning, everybody. And for those people who have struggled across London to join us in person, thank you very much for coming. As you know, we're great believers in face-to-face meetings that inform us, so it's great to see some people in the room. We've also got a few hundred people on the livestream, so for those of you on the livestream, I hope A, it's working, and B, we'll make it easy to take questions off the livestream when we get to the Q&A session. We're actually gonna do this annual results presentation a bit differently, a little bit of constructive disruption. So, we've posted our release for today, so I'm assuming that most people have seen the numbers.
We've got books on the chairs, which have also got some detailed numbers in the appendix, but we're not gonna spend too much time on the numbers. We're actually gonna just talk a little bit about how we've got to where we are and where this business is going over the next five years. I'll speak for about 15-20 minutes. Then we're gonna do a little demo, and then Gareth is gonna answer 400 very tricky questions. That is the flow of the day.
Without further ado, let's get started. First of all, the numbers. 2024, as I said in the release today, really on every measure, 2024 was an outstanding year for our company. Double-digit revenue growth, 20%-plus Adjusted Operating Profit growth, double-digit dividend growth. We knocked the ball out of the park on our Free Cash Flow.
And the businesses feel strong. We grew internationally. If you look at our three biggest geographic markets, I'll come onto that in a second, the United States, China and Asia, and the GCC in Southeast Asia, we really are growing at a clip in all those markets. The investment that we started making during COVID, in our enterprise technology platforms, in our data platforms, in improving our products and services is really paying significant dividends, and we feel very confident about 2025.
In short- form, that's really what we did in 2024. You see that on the kind of key measures, double-digit underlying growth, very strong financial operating performance. Our margins continuing to tick back up. We've grown our dividends again. We've got a strong balance sheet, so we're recommencing our share buyback program at a minimum of GBP 200 million for the year.
That should underpin our operating performance through 2025. Today, there are two businesses in my session I'm not gonna talk very much about. We can talk about them as much as people want in the Q&A. That's our academic markets business and our TechTarget business. Academic markets really had a great year, 2024. In fact, it was the best ever revenue and performance year for that business in my time in the company, driven by three things, I would say, in order as it relates to the numbers.
The first is the world is falling in love with original and specified content, and we have a lot of that. So we proactively stepped into contractual discussions and negotiations with a series of companies who were interested in our highly specified content and constructed some really quite well-managed data access archive deals. Some of that revenue is one-off, doesn't repeat. Some of it is recurring. So we've got a recurring performance of around 4% and a one-off outcome in 2024, which is really quite striking. We've actually used some of that cash from those deals to invest further, both in that business and more broadly, and we'll come on and talk about that in a second.
Secondly, our open business, which for long-standing Informa watchers and T&F watchers will know, really, we went from a standing start in the open business. It's performing well, both in submission volumes and in our ability to handle those submission volumes and in our ability to extend our open and hybrid journal presence. And then thirdly, we brought in some fresh leadership in Penny Ladkin-Brand, who some of you will know.
And Penny is doing exactly what those of you who know would expect and what we wanted, which is bringing forensic attention and ambition to both the detail and the delivery in that business, and also looking internationally at what more we can do to take share, grow our market position, and extract more value from the knowledge that we've got. So a business doing well, performing well, and leaning into 2025 with a similar ambition to do 4% growth in 2025.
Informa TechTarget, I'm not gonna get into the detail of because it has a listing in the U.S., we'll be doing a listing's results presentation in the U.S. in a few weeks. But it remains on plan versus the guidance that we have given, the markets. What I wanna talk about is this, what we call from endings to beginnings, to be slightly portentous or possibly pretentious, and what I wanna do is to kinda go back to go forward.
Essentially, the summary of what we're talking about is that what we've done in the last decade and so is we've built a growth platform, particularly in the B2B exhibitions and events market, and it's now very obvious in our numbers. It's very obvious in our portfolio. It's very obvious in our performance, but it was not so obvious 10 years ago, and essentially, the company has gone through a series of chapters, stages.
They're not quite as neat as they look on PowerPoint, but the way to really think about them is we devised a strategy, we implemented it, we then survived and thrived on the exit from COVID, and then we accelerated it. And that last chapter finished at the end of 2024. So that period of the company is over. What we're now focused on is what do we do with this growth platform that we've built and grown over that period.
10 years ago, this was the business, the B2B business. If you looked at it, it was effectively a low-to-no-growth business. Even though interest rates were lower in those days, it was effectively a low-to-no-growth business. Today, we're consistently delivering 5%+ revenue growth across a much larger portfolio. Our revenues in that market were about a billion eight.
In 2025, pro forma will be just north of $5 billion of revenue. Our B2B revenues will be north of $4 billion. Back then, we had about six of what we would call marquee and power brands, so brands with revenues of over $20 million. Now we've got 65, and some of those are way ahead of that number. And I'm gonna unpick our brands. And then most materially, our geographic mix was completely different.
We were a UK-European-centric business, and now we are not. Geographically, if you look at our top three markets, it is the United States of America, China and Asia, and then the UAE Growth Corridor. I think the U.K. is our ninth market geographically. It's about the same size in B2B as Brazil. Important market, but it doesn't rank at the top of the company. We have become a truly international business.
We're in a great market. The B2B market is a great market. It's about 30 billion-plus of revenue, growing CAGR about 5%, and it's a truly global business. It's a, it's an international business, and it has very long-term structural, growth, dynamics. If you cut that market down, about half that market is run and owned by trade associations, almost invariably owning one major brand as a function of their relationship with their industry. And the main job of the trade association is mainly lobbying. The event is normally a funding mechanism or a meeting mechanism for the community.
We actually have a number of trade association partnerships or ownerships, but they tend to be spot or single brand players. They're not portfolio players by the definition of a trade association. You then have a significant number of entrepreneurs, innovation, startup.
So you think of it as a market, there's a lot of new innovation in this market, which is great for businesses like ours if you have a platform, 'cause you can spot that innovation, buy it, bring it in, add it to your portfolio, plug, move on, internationalize it, and grow. But you have to have the platform to do that with. And our position in that market is a very strong one. If you look at what are the structural growth drivers in that market and just work your way around this circle, I'm not sure I would put it at the top of internationally translatable acronyms, but MICE is the term of art to describe this business; M eetings, Incentives, Conferences, and Exhibitions.
If you wander around the world that I wander around and you talk to governments or governors or states or city-states, for many of those locations, MICE is a primary one, two, or three economic strategy lever for driving economic growth because it brings industry specialization, business tourism, traffic, and foreign direct investment. There are many places around the world, and we've partnered with a number of them.
We've announced another partnership today where this has been a way of driving significant GDP and country differentiation. Secondly, business is specialized, and the process of specialization continues apace. We actually see that in our academic business as much as in our B2B business, subject specialization, category, and business specialization. Every time a sector subspecializes, that's an opportunity for a new product for us. That's a new supply chain. That's a new market. That's a new set of competitors.
So the market expands because of specialization on a year-on-year basis. Supply chain disruption, which we are seeing a lot of at the moment because of geopolitics, is actually perversely good for the business because every time you need to rehouse your supply chain, reset your suppliers, relocate, find a new distributor, find a new market to access, the trade show is a perfect route to market and a very, very efficient one.
It's great to have the people in the room, but we've also got a lot of people on livestream. One of the things we've found in this business is that the power of face-to-face has gone up as people do less and less face-to-face in their day-to-day activity. And the big get bigger. So if you do have 50 to 100 major brands, the market migrates to the major brands for a number of reasons.
And one of those reasons is business travel efficiency. People don't want to do 40 bilateral business trips. They want to do one trip and 40 efficient meetings. And that's nowhere easier than at the single-point meeting of an industry or a community.
And then finally, a thought for everybody in this room, 'cause I'm gonna hazard a guess that if I asked everyone to do a show of hands and maybe on the livestream, are you or are you not a knowledge worker? Are you in a profession which is a knowledge-based profession? And the answer is yes, all of us are. And AI is gonna hit the knowledge industries like a tsunami because it's gonna take a vast range of cognitive process activity out. It's gonna be automated. It's gonna be instantaneous. It's gonna be verifiable. And it's going to free up time.
In our business, we don't view it as a burden. We view it as a boon because with that freed up time, people, knowledge workers will have to do things other than process work because the value in process work is gonna go down. And therefore, there'll be less admin and more added value, less process and more product innovation.
And that's great for our B2B business because the way in which you get that, the way in which you gain that is by coming together with your industry, with your community, seeing what's new, seeing what's changing, seeing where the future is going, and less time doing base-level cognitive process activity. So the AI time dividend in our analysis is effectively an expansion of the total addressable market. So those are the structural growth drivers in the market that we've chosen to play in.
Equally, look at geographically where the world is going. Where are the growth geographies? And in essence, what we're all seeing around the world is a shift from the U.K. and Europe to the rest of the world, including North America. North America, as we're all living, has a disproportionate disadvantage 'cause it's a single largest economy in the world. It's a single currency. It's a single market, and it's the global currency. And effectively, it controls the financial markets. So net, the U.S. is a distinguishing player. But for the U.K. and Europe, it's a big change. And the rest of the world is offering enormous growth. And we have followed that growth. I've said this internally many times.
When I talked to the board back 11, 12 years ago and said, "What should our strategy be?" I had a map which had a picture of the U.K. and Europe and two big maps of the rest of the world, North America and the rest of the world. We're big here. We need to get small here and big here. And that's basically what we've done. We've become an international business, and we've followed where the growth is.
We've also followed where the GDP growth rates are. So if you look at where GDP growth rates are in single or high single-digit growth, they're in countries like the UAE, India, Indonesia, Egypt, Philippines. The U.S. a little bit lower, but the scale of that market makes it very, very attractive. So the shape of the company geographically has changed.
And then on top of that, we had to make some decisions about which categories would we choose to build in. We haven't ended up in these categories by accident. We didn't bump into these categories. We took a view that there were some criteria about how should you choose where to pay to play. We made a decision to be a B2B business, not a B2C business.
We made a decision to look at very fragmented supply chains 'cause that's very, very relevant to the product and the service that we offer, that we wanted international communities, not purely domestic ones, that we wanted markets where there were high levels of innovation and where the end market was high margin. And therefore, the customers were more focused on value rather than volume and price and the end markets where there was structural growth.
And in the markets in which we've chosen to play and build our brand portfolio, that's actually largely what you see. And that is also contributing to our growth rate. We now have about 800 individual B2B brands. Many of those are must-attend brands in their markets. And to get into the top 20 in our brand portfolio, the minimum revenue threshold is now $35 million.
10 years ago, I think we had $135 million thereabouts in total in our B2B event portfolio. It's by order of magnitude a completely different portfolio of brands. And what drives inside Informa, on top of those structural growth drivers you see on the left-hand side of that chart, what are we doing inside Informa that isn't unique to us, but we're really doubling down on to extract greater revenues, greater earnings, greater profits, and greater growth.
We're doing work on price, price for value, yield, bundling, segmentation, market expansion. We're doing work on market penetration, greater market share, greater market share of participants, greater market share of, new entrants into the market. We're doing greater geo-expansion, leading, taking our leading brands from one market to two markets to three markets to four markets, brand expansion, brand syndication, brand internationalization. There's capacity coming into the market.
There's probably 20%-30% new capacity and supply coming into the market in the next, five years, particularly in what we call the global gateway cities of the world, which I will unpick a little bit. Historically, as you will know, the revenue model in trade shows was the exhibitors and sponsors pay, the attendees come. Actually, as the value of the product goes up, the exhibitors and the sponsors pay and the attendees can also see value.
And if you can create that as a bundled product, then actually that's an alternative revenue stream. And then finally, there are services you can wrap around that community. We move roughly six million people a year around our events. And what you can provide around those event services allows you to develop new products, new services, and expand your revenue line.
These are the top eight brands that we have applied our approach to geo-expansion or brand syndication to in pharma, in healthcare, in cybersecurity, in hospitality, in food, in fintech, in aviation, in private capital, in real estate. I think my math is roughly right. We've now those single brands, and they all started out as single brands. They're now deployed in 80 locations. And that's just eight of the brands.
If you take the biggest of those by revenue, WHX, which is our healthcare brand, now $170 million single portfolio, the meeting point for the healthcare industry, both established and innovative, first edition in 1975, 14 editions now in the calendar year spread around the world, and with growth in new venue capacity in six of those locations coming in 2026. Gateway Cities, this is the world that I live in. This is the world where our B2B events communities live in. Gateway Cities, what are they? They're a concept. They're a brand. They're an idea. But actually, they're where the market migrates to. And each of those locations has some constituent facts or features.
By definition, they have a world-class venue of scale, not just a shed, not just a space, but a world-class venue that works, that is modular, that has got integrated technology that allows you to put tracking technology and analytic technology around, allows exhibitors to display their increasingly technology-based products and services. They have airport capacity, and they have connections. And we know that 'cause we actually have a trade show that does that, World Routes.
They have a world-class airline or more than one world-class airline, both with routes and with service and with capacity for expansion. They have a scale and range of hotel capacity. If you're gonna run a major brand in a market with 100,000 visitors at the event, that might be 150,000 visitors around that event because you've got all the people who do build, who do design, who do construction, who do security.
So you need a range of hotel capacity to go from two-star to five-star in order to be able to handle that. That narrows the number of cities that tick that box. You need city transport infrastructure 'cause if you drop 100,000 people in a city, even a city the size of London, that has an effect. And you need to be able to move those people around 'cause these are business tourism travelers who are looking to be efficient in the distribution of their time. They're not languorously wandering around the city enjoying the sights, or most of them aren't. And it helps a bit if you have some distinctive city or location branding or identity.
As you go around the world and you go to Dubai or Vegas or Austin or Riyadh or Bangkok or Sydney or Paris, you see cities doing that, creating brands that attract travelers, industries, communities, and B2B brands like ours in order to build the presence of a city and a location in a particular market.
Today, there's about 6 million sq m of capacity in and around that community of gateway cities so described. In the time period of our One Informa program, we think that'll step up to around 8 million sq m. We can fill that. You've got customer demand, and you've got supply-side delivery, and you've got the ability to add more services, and you've got the tailwind of the other structural growth elements in the market. Today, we're delighted to announce another partnership.
I often say that partnerships are a bit of an Informa superpower. We have a number of partnerships around the world with trade associations in our academic business, but also in our B2B business with cities, with governments, with city-states, with locations. And today, we're delighted to announce a partnership with the city of Dubai, specifically with the Dubai World Trade Centre, which, if you know this business at all, you'll know that's a powerhouse, venue location, in this industry.
They are a venue operator and a brand owner and operator and will be combining their business with our business, to create a platform called Informa International to further accelerate growth, brand extension, brand syndication, and innovation in those growth categories. Their business and our business in those markets is currently growing at about 20%+ a year. Do that over three years.
This will be a billion-dollar business in three years in the time of One Informa, 2025 to 2028. The categories today are, as listed, healthcare, energy, aviation, food, enterprise tech, human resources. We're really thrilled about this. We know our partners well. We've been in deep partnership with them for many years.
They were one of the first people whom I met, many years back. We've worked with them. They've worked with us. The complementarity, I think, will be very, very clear. And we intend to bring this to market as an operating entity in 2026. So what's our outlook for 2025? We're confident in our guidance, 5% consistent group underlying growth. That obviously is a mix. We see our academic business hitting 4%. We see our B2B business 7%+ . And we'll talk in detail about the Informa TechTarget business when we do the results.
But the numbers are as per current guidance. On earnings, we're comfortable with where consensus is on earnings growth. We're seeing another year of double-digit earnings growth. So that will see a step up. I think the earnings range is between GBP 0.56 and GBP 0.58 of earnings. We've done GBP 0.50 this year. So we're consistent. We're confident that we can sit behind that. We'll see further growth, therefore, in our dividends.
We're resuming our share buybacks, and we'll delever the business down to well within our capital allocation range. So you see our capital allocation framework on the right-hand side, which we put to the market a couple of years ago. And we reiterate the value of that mix of reinvestment, dividends, buybacks, and a comfortable balance sheet strength.
One Informa. For the colleagues in the room who are from Informa, and hopefully the colleagues on the livestream from Informa, this should not be news. This was the theme of our leadership summit at the beginning of the year. It's the drumbeat within the company. We've built a great business. We've built a great brand platform. We've built a great geographic position. And our intention now is to maximize the benefits of that in marketing, in data, in analytics, in customer engagement, in enterprise support, and therefore in performance.
Alex Roth, our Director of Strategy, has taken on the role of Director of Operational Transformation, working with our technology and marketing teams and to step up our delivery of these benefits on a brand-by-brand, market-by-market, category-by-category basis, so this will be the operational fuel for the performance growth that we're talking about financially, today. AI, no chief, no self-respecting chief executive, or certainly not one that wants to keep her or his job, can do a results presentation without talking about AI.
As I said earlier, for us, AI is a boon. It's not a burden. Like every knowledge business, I think this will allow us to take all of our key knowledge functions: marketing, analysts, editors, researchers, journalists, producers, exhibition directors, financial analysts, financial controllers, and look at the workflows and work out what can we automate, what can we add more value to. That's the question. What can you automate? What can you add more value to? We've had a chance to look inside the window of the LLM world because we've done some deals with all the key LLM players.
And so what we've done over the last year or so, as well as increasingly using NLP and machine learning and system capability on a day-to-day basis, is we've created our own version of an AI support agent to deploy in the company more widely, whose name is Alicia. And we'll be launching Alicia to the company on a company-wide basis, on the 8th of April, I think.
And the intention really is to essentially allow all colleagues within Informa to have all the benefits of AI speed of analytics, answers, summaries, capabilities in any language, but with the added benefit of having unique access to the proprietary data and information that only we have: all our documents, all our financials, all our information, all our data.
And we've done that also for security reasons so that we don't have 16,000-17,000 colleagues popping that into ChatGPT every Tuesday. It stays within our own perimeter. So it's currently in beta test. And so I thought the acid test of a beta test is to do it live at a presentation. So we're gonna do it live at a presentation. And my colleague, Nick Corner, who is sitting in the corner, is gonna be my beautiful assistant. Are you good with that, Nick?
Of course.
So what I'm gonna try and do is just give you a little sense. There's nothing new here. Hands up who's a regular ChatGPT or Copilot user. Pretty good. My advice, if you're not, become one. I now live on it, much to my colleagues and all my advisors' horror, because every answer I get, I cross-reference it across three AI agents to see whether it's accurate. So we're gonna see whether this works. So we're gonna ask only three questions, but bear with me. Hopefully, this will be revealing. So you ready, Nick?
We're good.
You good? Okay. So my, here's my first question. Alicia, who is going to ask the first question at Informa's 2024 full-year results presentation that we're holding here today? Nick Dempsey. For those who can't see this or on the livestream, the answer is from Alicia. Nick Dempsey from Barclays will ask the first question for the audience today. He will, in fact, ask three questions, as always, and the second will be the most difficult, so prepare yourself. Okay. This seems to be working.
So second question, Alicia, after such an outstanding year in 2024, will the market reward Informa for its performance? You should know well that past performance is no guarantee of future performance. And so the market will be skeptical, as always, and Informa will have to outperform again to really see the benefit. Well, who can argue with that? Okay. Third and final question. No, penultimate question. Okay, Alicia, how will, just so you know, those first two questions were scripted. I hope you'll forgive me, Nick, and don't make it three tricky questions. So this is a real-life question. So let's see where this goes. How will AI enhance B2B events?
Personalized event experiences, better analytics, enhanced networking, automated content creation and marketing, dynamic speaker matching, real-time data analytics and insights, virtual event assistance, automated post-event summarization, enhanced product demonstrations, predictive analytics for event planning, content personalization, automated language translation, sentiment analysis.
However, it's important to note that while AI offers numerous benefits, it should be used to enhance human creativity and decision-making. The most successful B2B events will likely be those that strike a balance between AI-driven efficiency and the irreplaceable human touch in event management and networking. I couldn't have written it better myself, and I promise you I didn't. Okay. Last question to give a bit of thought provocation. What can AI not replace at B2B events?
Human connections and networking, genuine interpersonal relationships, creative problem-solving, storytelling, inspirational speaking, strategic decision-making, complex negotiations, cultural sensitivity and etiquette, empathy, emotional support, creativity and event design, impromptu problem-solving, authentic leadership presence, contextual interpretation of data, quite critical of that, relationship-based sales, very important in enterprise businesses, mentorship and knowledge transfer.
In conclusion, whilst AI will undoubtedly transform many aspects of B2B events, the human touch remains irreplaceable in creating meaningful, impactful, and memorable experiences that drive business relationships forward. We're done, Nick. Can I go back to my presentation? Thank you very much. So in summary, where are we? First of all, we feel that the company's at a point whereby there's been a lot of changes in the last couple of years.
So one of the things we thought might be useful in 2025 is to open the company up a bit, to allow people who want to come in and get more of a hands-on touch and feel of what we do and how we do it and where the benefits are, not just what Alicia tells you. So we're gonna run four open events, invitation events for investors, in 2025.
We're gonna do a full capital markets day in Dubai in November, alongside the Dubai Air Show. By then, Informa International will be pretty much fully baked and will be ready to go live. And that's you'll be able to get a sense of what that is. There are only 50 places, and it will be, they'll be allocated on a first-come, most-liked basis. No, I'm joking. It'll be allocated on a first-come basis.
So, for those of you who are interested, please do email and let us know whether that works for you. Those are the dates. But alongside that, we're gonna do three field trips through the year, kind of smaller events, not so much razzmatazz. One at SuperReturn, which many of you might know, our private capital event, which is in Berlin, fantastic event, really fantastic event. But there's only 20, we can only allocate 20 spaces 'cause it's already sold out.
So it'll be 20 spaces, again, first-come, first-served basis. Cannes Lions, which many of you might know for those of you who followed Ascential , this will be our first Cannes. And we're already doing some interesting things there. And there we're gonna be 35 spaces.
Then at Food Ingredients at the back end of the year, in Paris, in France, it's one of our really great shows and it's a fantastic place to be. But again, it's a super popular event, so we're allocating 20 spaces. Choose which works. You're welcome to come to all four, but please max out on the capital markets days for those who want to get more specificity. In summary, this is where we are as we go into 2025. We've really come off a fantastic year for the company in 2024 across all of the businesses.
Taylor & Francis, I think is going into 2025, not just with a reset in leadership, but with a reset in possibility, underpinned by some cash flows for investment in some critical areas, and probably will be, in practical terms, a lead horse as a knowledge business, for how you can use AI to improve access for customers, productivity for authors, and speed of knowledge sharing. Informa TechTarget is an exciting opportunity for us to develop in an adjacency.
The combination is going extremely well. We opened for business at the beginning of the year. The business is tracking to the plan that we've laid out, and we'll take the market through that in detail when we do the formal results for Informa TechTarget. Our B2B business is a thing of beauty.
We've built this thing with care, with attention, with a couple of bumps along the way, not least a big bump called COVID. We came out of the other side of that, with real wind in our sails, and ambition, to take the market. If you go back to my market, $30 billion, we've got about 10% of that market, which means we've got plenty of runway ahead.
So there's real opportunity for growth. We feel confident about what we do, how we do it, where we do it, who we've chosen to partner with, and what we can do with it. So that's where we are. Those are our results for 2024, a sense of where we're taking the company and why it is what it is. And now Gareth and I are happy to take any and all questions. And I thought we might start with Nick. Nick.
Good morning. Nick Dempsey from Barclays. So first one, you haven't been specific on adjusted operating profit guidance, which you were, I think, last couple of years. I guess that makes investors a little bit nervous. Can we assume that you at least won't see margins go backwards in 2025 versus 2024? Second question, data offerings to enhance revenue per exhibitor at exhibitions.
Can you give us an example of how that is working and where we go with that next, just so we can get under the skin of that a bit more? And third question, in terms of forward bookings that you've seen from January and February shows into 2026, are we still seeing some positive momentum there? I'm not asking for 2026 guidance, but just about the momentum.
Okay. Thanks, Nick. I will touch on the first and then hand over to Gareth, and then I'll come back on the second, and then we'll tag team between the two of us on the third. I mean, you've been following us for a long time. We never gave adjusted operating guidance, profit guidance. We've picked up a couple of questions about this, this morning. Before COVID, we never did. We only gave adjusted operating guidance through COVID because everybody was so spooked by COVID that they wanted to know we weren't gonna fall over completely.
We're way past that. So we've given, we've given earnings guidance, so we've given the kind of bookends of the P&L, and we're pretty comfortable with where consensus is, on the earnings. So you can kind of work out, reverse engineer. But your specific question, no, sorry, yeah, the margins will grow for sure. So I wouldn't, if that's what's underlying the kind of, is this some sort of subtle piece of sophistry to take our margins down? No, it isn't. Gareth, anything you wanna add?
Yeah, exactly. So funding is just in the past, we've talked about, you know, with GAP I or GAP II , there being kind of an upfront investment. And what we're saying is actually we think we can deliver the benefits and the consistent levels of growth that we were targeting in the future in a way that certainly doesn't take the margin backwards and actually should be able to progressively expand the margin, you know, slowly through the one- and forward period. So yeah, that's not, self-funding's not a code for the margins going backwards.
On data offerings, we're doing more and more. We launched a specific branded product called Lead Insights, which actually came out of our Dubai business originally, our Dubai-based business, which we're offering as a kind of bundled service or an independent, individually paid service, alongside our major brands, which kind of does what the name would suggest for exhibitors, who are looking for some form of pre-qualified or pre-specified lead product.
We're using it extensively in our pre-marketing to improve our marketing efficiency on attendees and specifically on buyers, because, you know, Patrick, who runs our markets business, often says, you know, the key thing in our business is the quality of the audience. And in trade shows, that basically means the quality of the buyers. So the better our data gets, the more we can use that to drive more efficient and qualified buyers.
Obviously, in our Informa TechTarget business, we're using our data extensively, to create a whole series of, lead qualification and buyer intent products and services, which are all based off that. So it's a kind of core to what we're increasingly doing and falls firmly in that right-hand column on that slide of event amplification services. Forward growth 2026 or forward booking on 2026 versus what, from the shows we've run? I'm trying to think how many major shows we've run, probably a dozen, maybe. About a dozen. Five is the answer. So, you know, both our forward visibility into the first half of 2025 and for those that have traded in 2025 and are rebooking.
And in some of those, to go back to expansion, particularly in the GCC, where you've got new capacity coming in, we're not just forward booking for the same size of show, we're forward booking for a considerably enlarged show in early 2026. Steve?
Morning, Steve Liechti from Deutsche Numis. Yeah, can I take three as well? Just, can you give us an update on China? I think at the first half you said China mainland was +5%, Hong Kong was +10%. Can you just give us forward-looking thoughts there given GDP, et cetera? Second, can you just talk about, I know it's very difficult, but the Trump administration specifically, you kind of talked about what's going on in terms of tariffs and stuff like that.
Just talk a bit more about what that means for your events business in practice, and maybe in a U.S. context relative to other regions. And then almost the same question for academic, in terms of we've seen some funding cuts, indirect funding cuts in the U.S. Any implications that you see for your business directly or indirectly in terms of research funding?
Okay. Thanks, Steve. I'll maybe wander around those and ask Gareth to come in on the first one. And Penny, I might bring you in on the third if I could, if we could get a mic to Penny at the back. So, let's deal with the kind of macro question first. I mean, I think in revenue in our events business, the US is kind of north of $1 billion. So it's a big market for us. We're seeing nothing in our forward booking and our participation revenues that would indicate either a current or prospective trading issue.
As we often say, we're not oblivious to the macro in our business, but we trade in the micro. And the appetite for engagement and discussion in moments of turmoil actually goes up. At a specific level, there obviously are some curtailments on public official travel and engagement, but that's not really a big part of our business model. We're a kind of commercial provider of services generally to commercial activities. Doesn't mean we don't have any public sector footprint. We do, but it's not a big part of our portfolio. It's also our biggest market for colleagues. We probably have five, maybe five and a half, six thousand colleagues in the U.S.
And so we're very alive to the kind of more environmental impacts. I don't mean environmental in the sustainability sense. I mean contextually environmental impacts. You know, we're investing in our U.S. business and we feel confident that it'll hit its growth numbers. I'll let Penny come in in a minute on the U.S. funding of research activity. Again, it's not a big part of our P&L. It will have something of an impact, but one that we are comfortable we can ride out. But Penny will give you more color. On China, Gareth, do you wanna talk to China?
Yeah, I mean, you know, we're confident about our forward visibility on China. That's somewhere where we haven't traded any events yet so far in 2025, just 'cause in the normal cycle it really kicks off into May, June, in the annual cycle in that market, but we're comfortable with existing levels of growth in China to get to the guidance. We don't need an uptick in the numbers there, to get to the guidance, and both China and Hong Kong are now above where they were, you know, China well above, and Hong Kong back recovered to sort of pre-COVID levels.
The markets, you know, I think are again in structural growth and going well. What I would also say in terms of the region is the performance of the ASEAN business has been very strong, definitely stronger than where China and Hong Kong have been in 2024. And so that then is also, you know, a key element of the growth in the region from the business overall. And that business is, you know, that's sort of circa GBP 150 million worth of revenue, $200 million of revenue now. So it's a pretty scale business in its own right.
Penny, do you wanna come in on the U.S. question?
Okay. So on the, it's definitely a bit early to tell. For us, the U.S. is still very much more subscription-led than open access, just now. And, as much as there are some, there's some uncertainty in headwinds, we're actually excited by the tailwinds provided by AI. I don't know whether you saw kind of recently the release of the Google research assistant, which is cutting out 10 years from the research lifecycle.
So I think the ease and speed and the reduction in cost for research offers as many opportunities as some of the reductions in funding, and the publication is still a relatively small part of the research kind of ticket just now. So we'll wait and see.
Next question. I thought I saw a question in the back. No, no, it's one here. Are there any questions on the live stream? Are you running that, Richard?
Yeah, you can go to the phone. Any questions?
We have. Okay. Well, let's take it .
Cool. Thanks. Thanks . It's George from Morgan Stanley. I've got two questions if I could. One's a little bit of , I guess, a leading question to start with. You talked about how you expect the live B2B events market over the next, you know, number of years to grow at 5% per annum. You're guiding 7% this year. We've talked about that platform that you've built with the M&A over the recent years and the investment. Any reason why on a kind of organic basis you won't continue to take market share and maybe sustain that differential versus, yeah, 5%-7% differential as you look out over the next few years?
Then the second question, just on, on Informa International, if you could talk a little bit about the genesis of that partnership, coming around now. And, and I guess also the regional dynamics you're seeing in the GCC, in the overall Middle East region between, you know, we've got Saudi growing as a big market, the U.A.E. as well. How is that all interplaying between the different markets? Thank you.
Great questions. I was gonna bring Patrick in, but I think he's disappeared. Yeah, that's what Patrick always does. That's why he's so good. He always leaves when the hard questions come. Look, we would agree with you. I think, you know, if you take the base, you know, you put, you know, 5%-7% growth on that base, that's, you know, that's, you know, do that over three or four years, the differential just keeps growing.
So I think we've got a real opportunity to, and that actually in part, I think, I hope our partners in Dubai would say that, that speaks to, you know, who do you choose to partner with. That gives you partnership advantages. It gives you venue, date, location advantages. It gives you brand extension advantages.
So if you get it right, it becomes a bit of a self-fulfilling, you know, process. The GCC, I mean, I've spent a lot of time there in the last year, partly because we've been cooking this partnership, partly because we have our partnership joint venture in Saudi, which has gone from nothing to a circa $200 million business in four or five years.
You know, we had a technology event in Saudi in January and February with, you know, nearly 200,000 attendees. It was, it's an incredible meeting of the global technology community. Anyone who was anyone in that business was there, and I think that part of the world has really become a growth corridor because you look east to Southeast Asia, to Gareth's earlier point, you know, it's a two-hour hop to India.
It's a meeting place for the world, the UAE in particular, and within that, Dubai certainly, and Abu Dhabi as well. They to the criteria of global cities, they've built the architecture, they've built the infrastructure, particularly in Dubai. That really makes a difference. It's become a place where everybody's happy to meet. So it really is the meeting place of the world. How did it come about? We had an idea, we talked, it grew, it made sense, the timing was right.
We know each other well. Our portfolios are very complementary. Our people know each other. I think we have very good relationships. We're already a very big customer. We're now a much bigger customer. We probably have five, six hundred people on the ground in Dubai. We have a very big presence there. We really know how to do business in that market. It'll be a really good thing. Questions on the call?
Yes. So we do have a couple in a queue at this time. And the first one this morning will be coming from Adam Berlin of UBS. Please go ahead. Your line is open.
Yeah. Hi. Good morning. Can I just check I understand this Informa International business that you've just been talking about? So this is gonna be additional events coming into the portfolio, and you're gonna have a share of the new entity, which includes events you have today and events that are gonna be added, and is that then gonna be a separate reporting segment going forward, or will it just be another way of cutting the business? That's the first question. Just to understand that better.
Secondly, I suppose generally on just reporting segments, are you gonna be reporting B2B events as a single segment going forward? Are you gonna be keeping the Connect, Festivals and Market split? And if so, can you give us the EBIT split between those three segments? 'Cause I think you just gave us GBP 750 million for the three combined in the appendix, but it'd be helpful to know what the pro forma EBIT is for each segment, if that's how you're gonna keep reporting going forward.
Thanks, Adam. Sort of yes is the short answer to your question on Informa International. We'll be the largest shareholder. We'll consolidate it. We'll report it within Informa Markets. And essentially what we're doing is we're putting our portfolio of brands and their portfolio of brands together. A nd our combined view is that that will allow us to do international expansion, brand extension, product and service development. To go back, I think, to one of Nick's earlier questions, it'll give us a wider portfolio of brands to sell our wider range of services, including our data services.
It'll enhance our data pooling, and it'll give us a stronger market position for venue access and pricing and market expansion. Does that answer your question?
And so the events you're contributing of revenue of $500 million today?
Is that right?
I don't know. I think we've put a number for what the combined business is, which is around $700 million. We haven't broken out, you know, ours is X and theirs is Y. You know, we will have a, we will have a majority position, so you can sort of do the math, but that'll be the size of it on day one. Does that answer that question, Nick? Sorry, Adam.
Sort of.
Okay. Not sure what more I could say, really. On, on B2B and breakout and reporting, Gareth, do you wanna take that one?
Yeah. We specifically gave a breakout of Markets, Connect, and Festivals in the data today. So you can see how those two align, those three align, rather. It's a combination of events transferring in from the Informa Tech division, which where the events come into this segment, and then the non-events assets obviously go into Informa TechTarget. You've got a benefit of annualization of combinations from FY24, principally Ascential, having a full year effect of that.
And then you've got the divestment of Curinos coming out, and that gets you to GBP 2.7 billion, just over GBP 2.7 billion of revenue for that segment, in 2024. And then you can apply your growth on top of that. As you've seen in the slide, we've intentionally kind of given the revenue numbers by the three units and provided a single OP number. That's more how we're thinking about the business going forward, because under One Informa, what we're trying to do is run those three elements of the business more closely together from a functional point of view and a back office point of view. They very much go to market as three different divisions from a revenue point of view.
But in terms of how we run the customer experience, how we run the colleague experience, how we scale technology, how we use data, we're trying to use them, use those dynamics in a much more combined way across the three. And therefore, we've intentionally not given an OP split because that's how we're thinking about the business, going forward, more than how we thought about it before, when Informa were quite distinct.
Next question.
Okay. So we, so we should expect going forward that you're just gonna report the revenues, but not the one, one number, one number for profit for B2B events.
Yeah. That's kind of the thing how we'll talk to you about it.
Okay. Thanks.
Thanks, Adam. Next question on the phone.
Yes, sir. The next question, and they'll be coming from Sami Kassab of BNP Paribas. Please go ahead.
Thank you very much. Good morning, gentlemen and everyone. How should I think of your approach to share buybacks? Can I think that the announcement today means you are institutionalizing a buyback, that we can expect share repurchases every year going forward, or is today's announcement only reflective of the surplus capital received from your recent disposals, and future cash returns will be conditional upon different outcomes? Then secondly, I'm trying to gauge how big are U.S. domestic shows in your U.S. events business.
Can you elaborate on that and perhaps share with us the share of revenues that come from foreign exhibitors and foreign visitors going into the U.S.? And lastly, if I may, in academic, can you tell us the share of Open Access revenues? Given that you've increased prices of APCs by 15%-20%+ in 2025, what type of volume growth do you expect this year? In other words, what is the price elasticity in the Open Access publishing model? Thank you.
Thanks, Sami. Share buybacks, do you wanna take that?
Yeah. I mean, we've talked about the share buybacks today restarting. We've intentionally called it an initial minimum of GBP 200 million. So that's our commitment, but we're gonna see how the year evolves and we can go from there. So we're not saying that is the end of the opportunity for buybacks in 2025. In terms of your comment about institutionalizing it, we'd say yes, we have.
If you look at our capital allocation policy that we brought to the market 18 months ago, maybe two years ago, that clearly states that we're gonna generate and maximize our free cash flow. We're then gonna allocate an appropriate amount to internal organic investment in the business. We're going to look at the inorganic opportunities to invest. Then the balance of that, you know, we're gonna look at free cash, share buybacks.
So it is definitely in the permanent mix of the business. How much you do depends on what the inorganic opportunities to invest are. That's where there's a degree of flex. That's why we haven't made a you know multi-year commitment to the share buyback in terms of a number today, because you've got to be cognizant of the fact that assets could come to market that you might wanna buy. But in terms of the institutionalization, yes, it's definitely a clear part of our capital allocation policy, going forward.
I might bring you in, Penny, if I get it wrong on academic. But on U.S. domestic shows, if I understand the question, we don't break out our revenues by location source. But actually, it's, I would say it's predominantly a domestic business, but with in certain categories a high degree of international participation. That doesn't sound like a contradiction in terms. So in luxury, for example, there's a high degree of international participants in art and super yachting and top-end pleasure craft. In food and food tech, there's a high degree of international exhibitors. But in construction, you know, it's very much a domestic business. So it really varies depending upon the sector.
But if what's behind your question, are we seeing any issues on so-called foreign, although I'm not quite sure what foreign means, participation, we're not. On academic Open Access revenues, 100, about 100. Oh, so pure and hybrid. Is that about right? A little bit higher? Great. How much higher? Let's have a budget meeting. So, and growth, you know, we're pretty optimistic about growth this year. I mean, APC prices, they're a range. They're not a spot number.
So the price percentage that you quote is a kind of an aggregate. And we offer quite a number of venues now in Open Access journals, both pure and hybrid. So, you know, by the very nature of that venue, you wanna make it open. And we think we're pretty competitive both in terms of quality, and subject area choice, and access.
But, you know, we feel, we feel good about that market. And I think we're now at a point whereby, a little bit like in B2B, we've built a, we've built a platform, we've built a capability, we've built a processing capability. We've also built a reputation. Now we wanna work on increasing that reputation and the visibility of some of the journal brands and the services that you wrap around it.
Please forgive me. I did not understand the answer on the side of, open access. You said a hundred million plus, or did you specify that most specifically?
I did. I said a hundred million plus.
Thank you.
Anything else, Sami?
All good. Thank you very much. Thank you very much.
One more call. Very much. One more question on the call.
Yes, sir. The next question today will be coming from Simon Baker of Bernstein. Please go ahead.
Yeah. Thank you. Good morning, and thank you for taking the questions. Two questions, please. One, as a follow-on on the buyback question, to what extent does the GBP 200 million plus buyback program reflect a, a sort of, a, a focus sort of moving more on the integration of Ascential and Tarsus and TechTarget, if you like, a sort of a limitation on the management bandwidth of maybe pursuing some more inorganic acquisitions this year? Or do you think you still have plenty of capacity to, to pursue more there? First question.
And then secondly, on the AI partnerships pipeline, are there more, are there more conversations taking place? To what extent does the 4% organic revenue growth guidance for this year exclude anything additional there, please? Thank you.
Great questions. There are some further conversations in the pipeline as you describe it. They're not in that 4% number. The management bandwidth is unlimited. That's getting a laugh mainly from the management in the audience. But no, the reason why we're guiding as we're guiding for 2025 is, you know, we are. We're signaling, I think, in very very clear terms that our intention is to build value and performance out of what we've got, to double down on organic growth, to double down on deleveraging, to reintroduce share buybacks, to drive organic growth, to create expansion through partnerships like in Dubai.
That doesn't mean that we are completely closed to any targeted spot additions, which candidly we can sort of do. But 2025 is a year of yield growth and compound performance, and we feel confident that that'll be rewarding for the business and rewarding for shareholders.
Any questions left in the audience that are here? Going, going. Gone? Any further questions on the live stream? Fantastic. Thank you very much for people's attention. I hope you got something out of today beyond just the, the straight, results summary. And, we look forward to, seeing who's already got their application in for the, first come, first served investor days. Take care.