There’s nothing like the word ‘data’ for exciting investors. It triggers thoughts of exclusive content, the very antidote to AI’s commoditisation of information.
Perfectly good companies feel the need to reassure investors that “our AI capability is embedded across the portfolio and, through investment in technology stack and enhancing AI powered solutions, we are now offering a more personalised experience to customers…This success is driven by our AI experts.”
Those honeyed words came this month from the 2024 annual report of GlobalData Plc, “a leading data, insights, and analytics platform for the world’s largest industries”. The UK-based, but increasingly international, company last year reported £285.5mn revenue and £116.8mn EBITDA (both 5% ahead) with a margin of 41% and no debt. The performance was attributed to “our unique data, expert analysis, and innovative solutions into an integrated suite of client solutions and digital community platforms”.
Mike Danson, founder, CEO and majority shareholder of the listed company, described 2024 as “transformational” following the mid-year sale of 40% of its (largest) Healthcare division to Inflexion private equity for a net proceeds of £434mn.
The divestment had been born of the founder’s frustration with a sluggish share price which, with raised interest rates, had constrained the M&A of a company that has completed 30 deals in the last 15 years. Acquisitions had been getting just too expensive.
Continual approaches from private equity, either to take GlobalData private or to divest key assets, are believed to have made Danson think about the alternatives. The upshot was an approach by his M&A director Mark Thornton to a former 3i private equity colleague, David Whileman, now a partner at Inflexion. His Partnership Capital Fund had created Curinos, the $243mn retail banking data business, from a 2021 merger of Informa’s FBX and Novantas, with the listed Informa retaining 56%. Whileman jumped at the chance to do it again, with GlobalData. The deal was signed just 77 days after the first discussion.
The transaction transformed GlobalData’s balance sheet from net debt of £230.8mn (as at 30 June 2023) to net cash. As well as improving its profitability and cash flow, the “new” balance sheet created M&A opportunities for the rest of the company too.
It was a great Christmas present for Danson and his shareholders.
But the deal must have reminded him of the time – 17 years previously – when he had sold his Datamonitor company to Informa for an eye-watering £513mn (7x revenue). Some of the buyer’s major investors had voted against the top-of-the-market deal. It was also bad timing for Informa which ended up cutting its 2008 dividend and having a rights issue in the global banking crisis that followed. Two years later, Danson implied to the FT that Datamonitor’s value would have been halved by the banking shocks.
The fact that, eight years later, he bought back what were arguably the best bits of Datamonitor for just £25mn has been used to illustrate a degree of M&A recklessness by Informa (in the years before it was re-born as the trade show world leader). Danson’s opportunistic buyback was the start of GlobalData whose leading brands now include: Canadean, Kable, Celent, LinkUp, Verdict, Current Analysis, PharmSource, MEED, and MarketLine. Its customers are neatly spread across Europe, the US and, increasingly, Asia.
Some 75% of revenues are annual subscriptions from member companies which have access to substantial volumes of news, analysis, original data and research, high-value consultancy, and networking events. GlobalData uses a single scaleable platform across all market sectors “to create differentiated and actionable insights”. It claims to offer 5,000 corporate customers “a single user-friendly interface, an end-to-end view of your entire industry value chain: from suppliers, manufacturers, channels to end-users (being consumers, patients, customers), all in one place and easily shared with colleagues.”
It’s just the latest company that claims to be building the kind of ‘platform dependency that has, for generations, grown customer loyalty for Bloomberg and Reuters in the financial markets. Of course.
But, perhaps, Informa’s disastrous acquisition in 2007 also had something to do with Datamonitor itself? What might the episode mean for GlobalData?
There are some simple reasons to question whether GlobalData is really much more an aggregator than a large-scale provider of exclusive information.
For all the undoubted strengths of a ‘one-stop-shop’ platform across 20 sectors, the levels of information vary from sector to sector on the GlobalData platform. But, while that might (or might not) create a challenge for the company in its sector-by-sector competition with the best specialists, the greater concern might be the way that it has sometimes acquired busineses that don’t seem to fit the strategy.
Two particular GlobalData deals make you think.
First, was the 2022 acquisition of Media Business Insight for about £23mn. Its primary B2B brands are the long-established print-digital magazines Broadcast and Screen International, together with a database of programming and producers, and some events. Few who knew the £7mn-revenue company (once owned by the former UK publisher EMAP) were prepared for Danson’s description of the acquisition as “bringing new and unique gold standard datasets across the film, TV and media markets to GlobalData. This, combined with our existing technology content, provides the group with a new vertical with deep media sector intelligence and related services while strengthening clients’ access to a more comprehensive rae of industry expertise.”
It seemed an unlikely description of MBI. Three years later, MBI itself is still going strong but there seems to be no trace of its information or brands on the GlobalData website. Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised because the GlobalData annual report describes MBI as “inherently different to the Groups’ main offering, and the brand, strategy and management of the business is separate from the rest of the Group.” Whatever happened to the “gold standard datasets”?
The second deal which raises eyebrows is yet smaller but even more curious. In August last year, GlobalData announced the £10mn acquisition of Business Trade Media International Ltd (BTMI). The company was unknown to most insiders, simply because the name had been changed just weeks before the deal was announced (although its former website is still online). GlobalData acknowledged that BTMI was being sold by CEO Danson himself. But that was not especially surprising given the group’s history of dealings and cross-charging between the founder’s private and public companies.
But more striking was GlobalData’s description of BTMI as giving the platform access to “a greater audience across our vertical coverage”. It claimed the deal added “a number of established digital media and industry news brands, which align to our sector coverage, and brings an additional annual digital audience of 4mn business leaders and decision-makers”. Given the “vendor’s” £3.6mn of accumulated losses in the few years before it was acquired by GlobalData (and its lack of any balance sheet cash at all at the end of 2023), it is interesting to see that BTMI is said to have generated £3.7mn of revenue and £0.8mn in 2024, according to GlobalData’s latest annual report.
But there’s also the ultimate guilty secret at BTMI.
The “new” company was not some kind of digital provider but the publisher of 25 print magazines. Yes. Its brands included: Laundry & Cleaning News, Tunnels & Tunnelling, Nuclear Engineering, Cranes Today, Business Car and Packaging Today. Most of the B2B magazines were light, to say the least, on anything that might be described as “data” – and all had free circulations (no subscriptions) of just a few thousand copies each. Saying that the portfolio included 30 websites only added to the sense of flim-flam.
But there are three reasons why these, admittedly small, acquisitions might raise questions about GlobalData (although this is one listed company that doesn’t much like to answer questions).
First, it does seem as though GlobalData is sometimes buying up relatively low-grade information assets in order to create ‘top-of-the-funnel’ B2B news services in each of its sectors – at a time when such content is becoming commoditised. Second, many of these brands are simply not high-value sources. Would GlobalData have acquired all (or any of) these printed magazines if not from its own principal shareholder? Third, the MBI claims of “gold standard” data might just cast doubt on some of the other content similarly described on the GlobalData platform.
To reiterate: Among much else, the acceleration of AI is sharply reducing the value of “nice to know” information while turbocharging “need to know”. Lest we forget, the future for so much business and professional media is all about information you really cannot get anywhere else: everything else is, increasingly, everywhere else.
But GlobalData is a successful business. Look at the numbers.
In five years, GlobalData has increased its revenue by almost 80%, doubled its EBITDA and pushed its profit margin up from 34% to 41%. As if that was not enough, its Pharma division was valued at 22x EBITDA. You might think that investors (who normally salivate at the mere mention of “data”) would be dying to get their hands on some of Danson’s shares when, as seems likely, he reduces his stake to improve the company’s rating when it joins the main London stock exchange later this year. But. despite, paying £79mn to buyback stock during 2024-5, GlobalData’s share price is down 32% YTD and its enterprise value is just £1.1bn:
| SnapShot GlobalData Plc | |||
| £mn | 2025* | 2024 | 2023 |
| Revenue | 338 | 286 | 27 |
| Health | 126 | 109 | 103 |
| Non-health | 212 | 176 | 170 |
| US | 35% | 35% | |
| EU | 27% | 27% | |
| UK | 15% | 16% | |
| APAC | 10% | 10% | |
| Ebitda | 138 | 117 | 111 |
| Margin | 41% | 41% | 41% |
| People | 3.8k | 3.7k | 3.5k |
| Cash (debt) | 22mn | 10mn | (244mn) |
GlobalData and others have benefitted from the growth in demand for information, helpfully fuelled by the volatility of times like the banking crisis and the covid pandemic. Such economic shocks have tended to add to the volatility of advertising-funded and consumer media. By contrast, they have enhanced the business of information providers which help corporates to understand the present and forecast the future.
That’s the information-hungry world in which GlobalData has become a £1bn international business, with 41% margins and a subscription-funding which means the company has, for example, already collected virtually all of its revenue for 2025.
There is real value in having comprehensive reference material for B2B verticals in one place but, inevitably, this approach represents the bundling of what may be high value data with other, more generally available news and information. The lessons of such bundling is that digital consumers (let alone savvy business information users) eventually get smart and won’t pay much for non-exclusive information and for the simple convenience of aggregation. Indeed, AI may increasingly enable corporates themselves to access much of the information currently aggregated by companies like GlobalData. This post-digital attack on content bundling must surely risk upsetting the business model by reducing the value of aggregation and depressing prices.
That’s the point.
Danson identifies his customers as being either corporates (competing as principals in one or more sectors) or business services firms with broader but, perhaps, shallower interests. But there is a third group (perhaps more numerous than the others) comprising people trading with those same corporates. If major auto companies, for example, are the primary, big-spending customers for automotive data and insights, there are many times as many suppliers and manufacturers involved say in rubber, metals, engine components or other materials. They are the tens of thousands of companies needing to keep abreast of developments and also hungry to get an instant fix on sectoral innovation. Arguably, that is the mass market in which GlobalData is thriving with its 5,000 customers, whereas the very high-priced data of individual sector specialists are further up the value chain. Mostly.
The issue is a live one, not just because of our own questions about ho-hum content v ‘real’ data.
Analysts (and the investors they advise) are seemingly more cautious than you might expect about GlobalData because slowing growth rates have implied narrowing scope for price increases. The question for Danson is, therefore, whether his company – which has made such a good act of building and projecting its unified, easy-access platform – might profitably choose to compete more directly with some of the powerful single-sector specialists, especially in sectors like technology, energy and food. Can it turbocharge growth now by de-merging not just healthcare but other sectors too?
Not for the first time, we remember that information providers (like most other companies) must either be low-cost, broad market providers OR high-value, high-priced specialists; those in the middle get squeezed. And ‘bundlers’ of information must eventually offer customers the opportunity to pay only for what they actually want, not for the whole mixed bundle. Mike Danson, a virtuoso packager of business information for decades, knows this better than anyone.
Will his healthcare windfall be the catalyst for strategic change (from multi-sector aggregator to higher-value, single-sector specialisation)? Or can Danson’s idea of building his brand (and subscription traffic) by providing B2B news and information free at the top of the marketing funnel work after all? Or will he sell – again?
