CloserStill Media and Nineteen Group chairman Phil Soar examines the current state of the UK trade show sector, highlighting strong global performance from major organisers alongside weaker domestic growth, rising costs, and misleading recovery figures.
We seem to have be emerging from a chaotic period of projected recession, Rachel Reeves uncertainty and Trump tariffs. It certainly isn’t plain sailing ahead, but we can perhaps stand back and analyse what might happen next and what is happening now.
This will be one theme of the AEO Conference (3-4 September) so here is something of an advance notice.
And many indicators appear very positive.
I spend my life looking for straws in the wind – and haystacks in the wind are even better. On 23 July we saw a trading statement from Informa which was very encouraging. Revenue growth overall was excellent and, quoting CEO Carter directly:
“Strong overall performance in the first half of 2025 and good visibility through the remainder of the year lead to upgraded full year guidance…including 8%+ underlying revenue growth in Live B2B Events (Informa Markets, Informa Connect, Informa Festivals)”
Haystacks in the wind – and very good news
Informa’s share price jumped 7% in the next two days and this was followed a day later by a very positive set of results from RELX. RELX’s Exhibition side – RX – grew 8% in revenues year on year like for like and adjusted operating profit grew at 9%.
As we all know, Informa and RX are by some distance the largest exhibition groups in the world and, because they are publicly quoted, the investment community looks first and foremost to their results as a guide to the direction of the trade show world.
In a nutshell, this is very, very good news for our business.
The difference between our companies and the UK
But there is an obvious qualification. Almost all of our big, UK based, companies no longer rely on the UK economy. Informa, RX, Clarion, CloserStill, DMG, Easyfairs, Terrapinn, Hyve, Montgomery et al are all fully international groups with only a smallish percentage of their turnover in the home base. Exact percentages are hard to calculate, but I don’t think that our largest 10 companies, if we aggregate them, have even 15% of their business in the UK. For RX and Informa, it is less than 10%.
Hence the Informa and RX results are very good news indeed for our big organisers.
But the trade show business in the UK is not just about the big companies based here in West London. It is also about the venues, the suppliers (GES, LiveBuzz etc) and the myriad of small companies which depend on the UK business.
And here we see a rather different picture.
GPD growth rate projected to average 1.2%
The attached chart is a synthesis from a number of projections from financial institutions about how fast the UK economy will grow in the next 5 years. This is inevitably speculative but most economists have tried to take into account Rachel Reeves problems with budget deficits and tax rises. GDP tries to represent the total value of all economic transactions in the UK. But the numbers for the next 5 years are deceptive because they are NOT GDP PER PERSON. GDP Per Person is a much better indicator of wealth because it tells us how much more the “average” person will have to spend in each of these years. And the answer is nothing.
The UK population continues to grow at around 600-700,000 a year. This is mainly through immigration (almost all of it legal) plus the gap between births and deaths. The birth rate may be falling fast but for over 100 years births have always exceeded deaths (in 2024 there were 595,000 births and 568,000 deaths in England and Wales).
UK income per head will not grow this decade
This means that the UK population is growing consistently at around 1% a year. And if the population grows at 1% and overall national GDP grows at 1%, then the growth in income and spending for the “average” person is basically zero – and will be for at least the next 5 years. So we won’t be getting any richer.
Unfortunately we are certain to see more and more tax rises from the Labour Government in this period, which will not add to the joy, nor the personal income, of the nation. (I stress this is not a political judgement – whichever party runs the government the problems would be the same and the solutions limited).
It is not clear how this will affect the trade show business and particular events. More detailed statistics from Ernst & Young for the last 6 years are not much fun. Since 2019 the Food and Beverage industry has grown 11% slower than the economy overall, while Hospitality (restaurants, bars etc) has fallen, relative to the whole economy, by 10%. And “events” are deemed to have fallen by even more – though this does not specifically suggest trade shows. As we know, all these sectors have been hit very hard since October 2024 by Rachel Reeves’ increase in the Minimum Wage and National Insurance rates (which, of course, did not affect “normal working people”, unless you worked in a bar presumably).
Against this, the area known as “Information and Communications” has grown in the period and is projected to grow faster than any other area in the rest of the decade (by some 19% above the average growth of the whole economy).
One might argue that all of these definitions apply to us – Hospitality, Food, Beverage, Events, Information and Communications……………… But I would add that the latest SASiE report tends to reinforce some of these numbers, particularly in the lower number of exhibitors at all UK events, and visitors to consumer shows (65% of all visitors in our industry go to consumer shows) since the pre-Covid years.
And the effect of any future recession?
Happily the predictions of a recession in the next 2 years have greatly receded. This must be very good news. Recessions do not necessarily have the same effects for everyone, but if we track the last 4 recessions in the UK then, in the four years after the start of these recessions, we lost on average some 8% of our total square metres and around 7% of our total visitor base (though largely from consumer shows).
So we see a very mixed message
On the one hand, our large companies (and 7 of the 10 biggest non-Messen exhibition companies in the world are based in London) seem to be very much on the up. On the other hand, the prospects for the industry locally in the UK might be seen as potentially static. I make the qualification I always make – none of this can be read as a comment or prediction on your own events.
A qualification about company reports and revenues
(Let me make a final qualification about how to interpret results from any of our companies. This relates to “revenue”. One of our largest companies – not Informa nor RX – put out a document very recently which basically said, “We have recovered well from covid and our revenues now exceed the pre-covid numbers of 2019.” I am afraid that this sort of thing is deeply disingenuous and (quite possibly) misleading.
Inflation rates vary from country to country, but in major Western markets inflation has been 20%+ since the recovery from covid in 2021.
Assume that Company X has raised its prices by 20% in that period (2021 – 2025) to exactly match inflation. If it is selling the same number of square metres and paying delegates, then its revenues in 2025 will be 20% higher than in 2019 – but the company will not have grown at all if we “inflation discount”.
If a company says it has recovered to where it was pre-covid (say 2019) then it can be saying one of two very different things. The first is that “we are selling exactly the same number of square metres etc, but we have never raised prices so we are exactly where we were in terms of revenues.” Or, rather more likely: “Our revenues are exactly the same as in 2019 but, as we have raised prices by 20% to match inflation, we are actually selling 17% less square metres and have 17% fewer paying delegates.”
A simple comparison might be Coca Cola announcing that their revenues in 2025 were flat, exactly the same as in 2024. But not revealing that in 2024 they sold One Billion cans of Coke at $1 a time, whereas in 2025 they sold just 500,000,000 but increased the price to $2 per can. The revenues might be exactly the same, but their business has actually halved. In our domain, how many square metres we sell and how many delegates we attract are the golden currencies – not the revenue in times of inflation. That’s the information we should be seeking. Don’t accept any substitutes)
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