The UK’s Centaur Media Plc has confirmed it is selling its Business Travel Show and The Meetings Show, to Northstar Travel Media, of the US, as forecast last month in Flashes & Flames. The deal, for £9.25m in cash, is expected to complete on 30 April. In 2018, the exhibitions made adjusted EBITDA of £1.7m (before central overhead allocations), up from £1.6m in 2017, on revenues of £6.4m (2017: £6.1m).
The deal follows last week’s sale by Centaur of its financial services portfolio to Metropolis Group, for £5m.
It is now believed that Centaur’s £3m-revenue engineering portfolio (comprising The Engineer and the associated Subcon exhibition) may be acquired by the Mark Allen Group (MAG), for some £2-3m. This would mark a further build-up in MAG’s engineering portfolio. In 2014, it acquired the 40-year-old engineering specialist Findlay Media whose brands included Eureka!, New Electronics, and Machinery. Just this week, it also announced the acquisition from UKi of some internationally-focused magazines in automotive and aviation (see the following item in MediaDeals).
If it acquires the Centaur engineering portfolio, MAG will have strong information and events in three main B2B groupings: Health, Education and Social Care; Engineering; and Music. Although its digital resources may still be under-developed, the company has become a strong exhibition organiser as well as a solidly profitable publisher of B2B magazines. Its 2017-18 revenue/ EBITDA was £43m/£7.2m (2016-17: £37.1m/£5.5m). Current year revenue is expected to be more than £50m, with about 40% from exhibitions (all acquired and launched in the last seven years). The story keeps getting better.
