Steve Monnington, MD of Mayfield Media Strategies, looks at the latest exhibition deals to land on the global table.
We kick off this issue with my favourite subject – Turkey. A few months ago UBM made preliminary steps into the Turkish market signing a highly strategic sales and marketing agreement with Rotaforte, organiser of the marketing leading Istanbul Jewellery shows. Now it has formalised the arrangement with the acquisition of 65 per cent of the business. It’s a great partnership for Rotaforte, strengthening its position in the region. It recently defeated a competitive launch and signed an exclusive support agreement with the main jewellery association.
The deal, which will become unconditional once Turkish Competition Board approval has been received, will further enhance UBM’s position as the worldwide market leading organiser for the jewellery sector. Turkey appears to be one of the new priority markets for UBM so we should expect to see more acquisition activity in Turkey in the coming months as it seeks to consolidate its position.
Easyfairs has been busy. First it acquired the Belgian business-to-business exhibition organiser, Fairtec, organiser of industrial technology shows in sectors such as measurement and control instrumentation, pumps and valves, subcontracting, welding, safety and security. Fairtec’s “one-day fair” formula, is bang in line with Easyfairs’ core strategy of providing value for money shows.
It also opportunistically picked up the assets of Business North West and Business Midlands in the UK from the liquidator of Nationwide Publishing Ltd which had ceased trading after running into financial difficulties. Horizontal events are usually the first victims of a recession as exhibitors cut marketing budgets so it will be interesting to see how Easyfairs re-packages these shows. If it can use its low-cost formula to make exhibiting a no-brainer for the exhibitors then this could prove to be a smart low-cost acquisition.
Meanwhile in the USA, WebMediaBrands, run by Alan Meckler of Mecklermedia fame which organises the Social Gaming Summits and the Freemium Summits (how to market the combination of free and premium paid for content) has acquired the Semantic Technology Conference and the SemanticUniverse.com blog from Wilshire Conferences. SemTech is the largest conference in the world dedicated to the rapidly growing topic of the Semantic Web and Linked Data.
Finally there was a conclusion to the saga of the UK Professional Beauty Show acquired by Emap from M2 Media’s Mark Maloney for US $30m less than four years ago. The original deal included six beauty exhibitions in the UK, including the flagship Professional Beauty Show and a number of related magazines. Maloney recently launched Total Beauty, a competitive event to Professional Beauty and one that split the market and more or less caused the demise of the brand that Emap had paid so much money for. The end result is that Emap sold the original business back to Maloney for an amount “substantially less than the original US $30m”.
This is a tricky subject as it is perfectly legal for a seller to wait for the expiration of the non-compete period and then launch against the shows they sold. Fortunately this sort of thing doesn’t happen too often but, whatever the rights and wrongs, it is damaging to the overall concept of M&A.
