Douglas Emslie, 25-year CEO and co-founder of the Tarsus trade show group, this week became deputy chair of the UK-based Jacobs Media (JM). The move, just 18 months after Informa’s $940mn acquisition of Tarsus, signals a step-up in the ambitions of JMG, the privately-owned travel and hospitality B2B.
Emslie is a star signing.
It’s 15 years since Clive Jacobs acquired the UK trade magazine Travel Weekly from Reed Elsevier (now RELX). It was an almost accidental business diversification for the restless travel entrepreneur who had co-founded Holiday Autos, Europe’s first car rental broker, which was sold for £43mn in 2003.
Travel Weekly, which was being informally hawked by its UK manager, had once been part of the ill-fated) Reed Travel Group, incorporating not just the B2B weekly in the US and UK but also the OAG aviation data group, and Hotel & Travel Index. Most of Reed’s non-UK travel operations (including Travel Weekly in the US and Asia) became part of what is now the EagleTree-owned Northstar Travel Group.
Jacobs took the bait and bought the UK edition, just as Reed’s local subsidiary made its big shift from domestic B2B print to global data-tech. Three years after buying Travel Weekly UK, he acquired an even older Reed print brand, The Caterer.
His transformation of JM from a print publisher into an increasingly international events business has been achieved through hard-fought sales growth, the creation of smart new brands and gutsy global launches. The company – whose nine brands include Travolution, ATAS, Aspire, Connecting Travel, Connections Luxury, Online Travel Training, and the Global Travel & Resilience Council – operates 160 events annually and claims to be “Europe’s largest travel & hospitality B2B media company”.
It still publishes the print editions of its original B2B weekly but now claims 650k monthly uniques for its web sites. Its events are attended by more than 10k annually.
The 2024 forecast of £20mn revenue / £2.1mn ‘normalised’ EBITDA will be up 45% and 31% respectively and marks the doubling of the business since 2018 – with little change in overall staffing. More sigificantly, the revenue has shifted from 42% print advertising in 2018 to just 13% in 2024; events have grown from 39% to 52%. Equally striking is the 2024 debut contribution of consultancy (17%) and online training (4%). These two ‘new’ categories will together account for up to two-thirds of the revenue growth in 2024:
| SnapShot Jacobs Media | ||||
£mn | 2024* | 2023 | 2022 | 2019 |
| Rev | 20.0 | 13.7 | 11.7 | 11.8 |
| UK | 59% | 60% | 72% | |
| Events | 52% | 59% | 54% | 44% |
| PrintAds | 13% | 24% | 28% | 38% |
| Cnsltng | 17% | |||
| Trng | 4% | |||
| Ebitda | 2.1 | 1.6 | 1.1 | 1.2 |
| Margin | 11% | 12% | 9% | 10% |
| People | 91 | 85 | 89 | |
It is believed that JM will budget in 2025 for revenue of £24mn (+20%) and £3.4mn EBITDA (+62%) and that the UK will account for less than 40% of revenue, compared with 59% last year and almost 80% in 2018. But, with Douglas Emslie as a significant minority investor, the focus will shift to the Middle East. Majority owner and chair Clive Jacobs is now resident in Dubai, where (among other things) Emslie’s Tarsus Group had operated the increasingly successful Dubai Air Show for more than 15 years.
The stage is set for Dubai to become the headquarters of JM, something the company’s new deputy chair supports. In June this year, he told Flashes & Flames: “The Middle East is incredibly strong. Dubai is having its best period ever, Abu Dhabi is growing and Saudi is doing incredibly well. There’s a massive shift of money into the Middle East where you’ve got great infrastructure and government support and a lot of the big exhibition brands are going into Saudi and other Gulf states. You only have to look at the traffic that’s going through Dubai (now the world’s busiest international airport) to see how rapidly the opportunities are opening up. Sixty per cent of people going to Dubai are actually now staying there, not merely transiting which illustrates the shift of business as well as leisure travel”.
The Middle East may already account for up to 5% of current JM revenue, and its planned reinvention involves launching trade shows, especially in the region. That’s the plan.
The majority of JM events are currently conferences and sponsored seminars. But nobody knows better than Doug Emslie that the group – and its valuation – could be transformed by one or two successful exhibition launches and, presumably, also broadening some of its existing events into trade shows. That reality implies eventual rationalisation of the JM events portfolio.
The future may be fewer, larger events: more global and more profitable.
JM has substantial business in Saudi Arabia but the inevitable focus on Dubai will alert RX, the RELX-owned trade show group, whose £1.2bn-revenue portfolio includes London’s long-established World Travel Market. It has spinoff editions in the US, Brazil, Japan, Singapore, France, Mexico, Bahamas – and Dubai, where the 31st Arabian Travel Market this year attracted 34k visitors from 16 countries – some 15% up on 2023.
Is JM planning a rival to RX’s Arabian Travel Market, perhaps in Saudi?
It’s also tempting to speculate on whether Jacobs Media could eventually “merge” with the $130mn-revenue Northstar Travel Group, of the US, whose future is now being talked around by EagleTree Capital, its eight-year owner. The dream of a truly global market leader is seductive. But such options may be more compelling after 2-3 years of the Jacobs-Emslie partnership that promises so much.
Keep watching.
