Live events are hot diversification for media companies. Axel Springer’s US-based Business Insider tried to soften the blow of its recent 21% redundancies by announcing the expansion of events, the three-year-old (profitable) Semafor global news strategy has been 50% funded by events, and even the subscriptions-rich Economist generates an estimated 10% of revenue from its 130 events. Axios and Bloomberg are claiming double-digit events revenue growth and Digiday (itself an events-led business) has reported that 70% of publishers now have at least some events revenue – 50% up in the past year. The would-be buyers of the UK’s Telegraph Media Group chose to emphasise events as being among their expansion targets.
Unsurprisingly, it’s a growth market also for the Financial Times which this year paid an estimated £80m (4x revenue) to acquire Invisso, the former Euromoney-owned portfolio of events for the structured finance, bond and private credit markets. Its FT Live subsidiary is believed now to have annualised revenue of some £60mn – doubled in the past three years.
The FT may be the first legacy daily news brand to generate more than 10% of its revenue from events.
FT Live is organiser of 300 events, including: Commodities Summit, Global Banking Summit, Global ABS, ABS East, The Covered Bond Congress, The Central & Eastern European Forum, The Global Borrowers and Bond Investors Forum, Future of the Car, The Global Boardroom, Hydrogen Summit, Women in Business, and the FT Weekend Festivals in London and Washington DC. It also organises highly-profitable, one-hour webinars on behalf of sponsors (some of which are said to pay £40k+ for the privilege). Separately, the FT’s TNW (“the next web”) annual conference and exhibition in Amsterdam attracts some 10,000 delegates and 200 exhibitors, a 17-year-old mecca for European startups and investors.
The Invisso acquisition may be significant because it has provided two of FT Live’s five largest events and has tipped the clear majority of revenue to ‘owned’ rather than the sponsored, agency-like events that have provided much of the growth in recent years.
Interestingly, the FT Live managing director Orson Francescone (who joined in 2019) is a former Euromoney executive. But the real significance of the deal is that FT Live – now with some 300 events, principally in the US, EU and UK (in that order) – now has about the same revenue as the former Euromoney generated from all its events in 2021. Arguably, the FT has filled the gap left by the breakup of Euromoney, which had been a global pioneer of large-scale, sponsor-fuelled B2B conferences.
FT Live is now believed to be considering the development of complementary digital content “products” in joint venture relationships with FT Specialist with which it already collaborates on events.
Significantly, these two Financial Times divisions may now account for about £140mn or 30% of the group’s £500mn revenue and, presumably, EBITDA margins of some 20%. The FT’s Longitude Research (£10mn revenue) and Strategies consultancy (biggest client: Google) may take this diversification total to some 35% of group revenue. These ‘ancillary’ businesses will, inevitably, account for more than 100% of the total profit of a group whose operating margin is a mere 6%.
Next month, Jon Slade succeeds the 19-year CEO John Ridding. As chief chief operating officer, Slade’s direct responsibilities have included FT Specialist and FT Strategies. Can we expect further non-news acquisitions as the group seeks to grow profits and diversify further from the distinctive salmon-pink newspaper?
Critically, Nikkei’s acquisition of the FT – for £844mn in 2015 – was still 28x operating profit eight years later. The real hope of increasing the payback (after a decade) depends on the continued growth of the FT’s Live, Specialist and Strategies subsidiaries. More M&A in 2026?
| SnapShot Financial Times | ||||
| £mn | 2023 | 2022 | 2021 | 2020 |
| Revenue | 510 | 460 | 440 | 370 |
| Op profit | 30 | 29 | 31 | (21) |
| Margin | 6% | 6% | 7% | — |
| Paid readers mn | 1.3 | 1.2 | 1.1 | 1.1 |
| People | 2,900 | 2,669 | 2,296 | 2,182 |
