(Oct 6): Britain's Informa aid on Tuesday that it would buy events organiser Clarion for £2.24 billion (US$3 billion) and separate its Taylor & Francis academic publishing arm, as CEO Stephen Carter focuses on expanding the group's fast-growing live events business.

The world's largest exhibitions group proposed raising £940 million in new equity to partly fund the acquisition of UK-based Clarion, which owns more than 100 business-to-business live event brands, including consumer electronics event IFA Berlin.

US private equity firm Blackstone last year launched a process to sell Clarion, sources told Reuters.

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

It also marks the latest deal-making in the exhibitions industry, which has seen live events roaring back after the Covid-19 pandemic disrupted the sector.

New York-based Searchlight Capital said in May that it would invest in CloserStill Media, in a deal giving it joint control alongside existing investor Providence.

The combined B2B live events business is expected to hold more than 1,000 brands across more than 40 market categories in over 30 countries, Informa said.

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

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

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

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