2024-03-08 11:29:05 ET
Informa plc (IFPJF)
Q4 2023 Earnings Conference Call
March 8, 2024, 4:30 AM ET
Company Participants
Stephen Carter - Group Chief Executive
Gareth Wright - Group Finance Director
Richard Menzies-Gow - Director, Investor Relations
Rupert John Joseph Hopley - Group General Counsel and Company Secretary
Andy Mullins - Chief Executive Officer, Informa Connect
Conference Call Participants
Fiona Orford-Williams - Edison
Carl Murdock-Smith - Berenberg
James Tait - Goldman Sachs
Sami Kassab - BNP Paribas
Adam Berlin - UBS
Nick Dempsey - Barclays
Steve Liechti - Numis
Rahul Chopra - HSBC
Tom Singlehurst - Citi
George Webb - Morgan Stanley
Presentation
Stephen Carter
Good morning, everyone, who’s here in person. We were having a bit of a book as to how many people would turn up in person, given it’s, A, we’ve actually announced our results before in the pre-closure, and B, it’s Friday. And so we thought we’d do our results on Friday to see if we could stimulate less working from home. So well done for everyone who’s turned up. And to those who are on the webcast, which does slightly outnumber the people in the room, I hope you can follow very clearly.
Usual format, myself and Gareth, and then we’ll throw it open to questions. We’ll try and do this as a bit of a click, because some of it will be familiar. But we’ve also tried in the second half of the presentation to give it a little bit more color on how we’re thinking about the future of the business. So hopefully that will be useful and interesting for everyone.
We’ve themed today’s presentation Momentum and Growth. We feel that’s a pretty fair and objectively accurate summary of where the business is. We’ve been recovering through COVID, building momentum and we step into 2024 from 2023 with a real sense of momentum in all parts of the business, and as you can see in the hard numbers, a clear path to continuing growth.
The backdrop for us is no different than it is for everybody else. We’re all living in an increasingly uncertain world, whether it’s uncertainty over the cost of capital, whether it’s uncertainty about the horror of military conflicts in some parts of the world, whether it’s the fact that half the world is deciding who should be responsible for governing them in 2024. So there’s a lot of change that we’re facing into.
I think one of the strengths of our business is that over the last decade, we’ve built a very strong geographical platform in the five major geographies of the world and I’ll talk a little bit about that later on in the presentation. But net, we feel that despite that geopolitical nervousness, we are well balanced and well set to be able to continue to deliver what we’ve set out to do.
Our business operates in what we’ve called for many years now, the knowledge and information economy, a place where having original content, proprietary data, intellectual property and a unique value add, whether that’s in the Academic Markets business or the B2B markets business, gives you a moat of defense. Not in perpetuity, but it gives you a starting place which gives you real strength.
The two sweet spots of our business are live and specialist. We have a view, which I think is being borne out, that as the world becomes progressively more digital, the only thing more valuable than digital is live. You see that most evidently probably in sports and music and --but we are definitely seeing it in our B2B business.
And in the knowledge market, being a generalist is a tough spot to be. You see that in many businesses. But being a specialist, that’s a strong spot to be and we have pursued a path of specialism as a means of differentiating our various products and services.
And you can see the value of specialization in each of our markets, whether it’s in live and on-demand in the B2B market, whether it’s in the emerging market for digital demand, lead generation and buyer intent that we’re stepping into through the partnership or proposed partnership with TechTarget or whether it’s in the Academic Markets area where the increasing investment in original research by countries and institutions around the world is providing primary growth in that market. And then the question is, how do we convert an unfair share of that?
So we think our mission statement as a company, championing the specialist, is a very powerful place to be. It resonates across all of our markets. I think it resonates well for colleagues in the company and it speaks to our customers who rightly regard themselves as operating in very specific areas that require a high degree of market knowledge to be a partner for them.
And alongside that, you need brands. You need to build a position that’s distinctive and original. There’s a difference between a name and a brand. There’s a difference between an identity and a brand. And we are trying to further enhance our brands, whether it is in the Academic Markets or the B2B business and we’ll talk about that in the second half of the presentation....
Read the full article on Seeking Alpha
For further details see:
Informa plc (IFPJF) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript