Specialist
Former executive, Informa Business Intelligence at Informa plc
Agenda
- ARPU growth trends across Pharma, Maritime and Financials
- Sources of pricing power within the Informa (LON: INF) Intelligence portfolio
- Strategic options for potentially non-core assets
- Content and data cost trends across the portfolio
- Product development needs and possible future CAPEX
Questions
1.
What’s in Informa’s intelligence division? Informa Intelligence generated about GBP 300m in revenue in 2020 and about GBP 162m in H1 2021. That’s obviously being driven by different verticals, including Pharma, Maritime and Financials, each of which contain a number of key assets.
2.
Do the constituents within the Pharma, Maritime and Financials verticals operate independently or are there sales or back-end synergies and shared functions?
3.
Could you estimate a range for what the Pharma vertical contributes to Informa Intelligence’s revenues? You suggested it contributed the most.
4.
How do you think about the like-for-like growth of the Pharma, Maritime and Financials verticals since 2019? What are your growth expectations?
5.
Why do you think Informa is keeping Curinos and selling the rest of the Financials business?
6.
You mentioned Pharma was attractive due to its TAM and the fundamentals. How did you think about the TAM for that Pharma business?
7.
Was the clinical trials business specifically dominating the Pharma vertical for Informa Intelligence?
8.
How quickly do you think the clinical trials data market is growing? We talked about around 10%-plus for the Pharma group. Is that in line with the growth in broader spend or is Informa capturing market share vs peers?
9.
How significant might the contribution from COVID-19 vaccine trials have been? Do you think that drove growth? Might that double-digit growth rate be sustainable post-pandemic?
10.
How do you think about average contract values in Pharma vs other verticals?
11.
Is vessel tracking the leading product within the maritime market?
12.
How do you think Informa is positioned in Pharma vs competitors such as Clarivate and Iqvia?
13.
Informa referenced about 90%-plus retention on the subscription side for the Intelligence division. How does that translate across the different verticals? Could retention be above 90% in some?
14.
You mentioned renewal discussions around pricing and I think everybody will experience price increases for products in 2022. What’s the normal level of YoY pricing increases? What are your 2022 expectations, given the broader narrative around factors such as inflation?
15.
Was Informa broadly pricing in line with the competition for the key products you outlined? Was it known as being priced at premium? Was it a discount for any of those products?
16.
What factors into the process of growing the business and acquiring new clients or subscribers? How do you think about the typical marketing and sales expense for those verticals? What’s the sales cycle? You mentioned changes made to the go-to-market.
17.
Informa talks about having 550 analysts and editors across the different verticals. What contribution might editorial be making to the cost base? Is that fixed, or could the number of analysts and editorial staff be reduced?
18.
Are there significant synergies between the data and editorial products around the clients that consume those products or the assets working on them internally?
19.
What are the costs for the business besides analysts and editors? Presumably, there’s daily collection and data cost. Is most of the data first-party or aggregated from other sources?
20.
Informa has access to hundreds of thousands of AIS [automatic identification system] trackers. Does it not own them all?
21.
You mentioned clinical trial data and I imagine a lot of data collection goes into that vertical as well. You said that was outsourced. Who makes the clinical trial data available? Informa is not conducting those trials.
22.
You mentioned Informa sources and collates clinical trial data from 28,000 sources. Is that all automated, or still manual?
23.
Which non-core assets within Informa Intelligence’s portfolio stand out as potential candidates that don’t necessarily fit within the broader product or portfolio, that could potentially be spun out?
24.
Do you think there are any natural trade buyers for the business in a complete form?
25.
Why do you think Informa wants to sell Informa Intelligence? It has relatively high recurring revenues or subscription revenues and good retention.
26.
Do you think the decision to sell was about feel that the business was not in a place to put in the CAPEX required to maintain competitiveness? Is it a CAPEX-intensive business?
27.
It doesn’t seem from what you have said that there’s much synergy between Informa Intelligence and the rest of the business that Informa would lose by selling. Is that correct?
28.
What are your thoughts on a potential valuation for the assets, which will obviously depend on the appetite in the market? You’ve mentioned there was probably already some interest in them and has been for some time. I think the company spoke about having a track record of 16x EBITDA for the sale of Informa Intelligence historically.
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