Leadership2 publishers2 min readPublished
Informa's £2.24bn Clarion deal brings the DSEI arms fair into a FTSE 100 events group
Informa is buying Clarion from Blackstone for £2.24bn, adding more than 100 events including DSEI, the defence fair held every two years at London's ExCel. The deal gives Informa scale, plus a protest risk tied to the Middle East conflict that has already disrupted its own events.
The Board Room · Leadership desk
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What happened
- City AM describes Clarion as the world's largest privately owned event and exhibition organiser.
- Informa will raise £940m through a share placing to help fund the deal, including an offer to retail investors through the broker RetailBook.
- After the acquisition, Informa expects the enlarged group to make £4.2bn a year in revenue from live events.
- Informa expects combining the businesses to save £50m in overlapping costs and add roughly £25m of income by 2029.
- Last year hundreds protested outside DSEI in London against the presence of Elbit Systems, Rafael and Israel Aerospace Industries, Israel's three biggest arms companies.
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Why it matters
- cost Existing shareholders are diluted by the placing and lose the share buyback now, while the promised earnings-per-share gain of mid-single digits does not arrive until 2027.
- exposure Cannes Lions and London Tech Week now have the same parent as an arms fair whose exhibitors have included state-owned suppliers to Israel's military, so protests at DSEI can damage the wider Informa brand.
- decision The Taylor & Francis review, due to report in March, will decide how much of Informa's earnings depend on live events. That in turn sets how much DSEI-type risk shareholders carry.
Clarion is Informa's second large events purchase in two years. It paid £1.2bn for Ascential in October 2024, which brought in Cannes Lions and Money 20/20, and that December it merged its tech business with TechTarget [21][22]. The two events deals come to about £3.44bn together [26]. Stephen Carter, the chief executive, said the company was "accelerating the focus" on its core live events business [17].
The two reports give different prices. The Guardian puts it at £2.24bn and City AM at £2.3bn [28][29]. On the Guardian's figure, the £940m placing covers about 42% of the cost and leaves roughly £1.3bn to be found. On City AM's figure it covers about 41% [24][25]. The shares rose 1.4% in early trading on Tuesday [20].
The trade-off is scale against exposure. DSEI is held every two years in London, and there are also editions in Germany and Japan [2]. Last year's protesters objected to three Israeli companies at the fair. All three have supplied the Israel Defense Forces, and two of them, Rafael and Israel Aerospace Industries, are state-owned [14]. Most of Clarion's portfolio is not defence. Its brands include IFA Berlin, the International Casino Exhibition and AwesomeCon in Washington [10][1].
The new exposure adds to a weakness Informa already has. After Clarion, Middle East politics can reach the group in two ways: through its own event calendar, and through protests outside a fair it owns in London. Its shares have been flat this year because conflict in the Middle East forced it to reschedule several events in the region [18]. It earns more than a third of its revenue in India, the Middle East and Asia [19].
I would expect DSEI to be a small line in the enlarged accounts. It is one of more than 100 Clarion events, and the London edition comes round only every second year [1][2]. Neither report includes DSEI's revenue or any comment from Informa on the fair.
The timing still matters. On the two-year cycle, the next London edition falls in 2027 [27]. That is the year from which Informa says the deal will lift earnings per share [11]. By then Taylor & Francis may have left the group. The publisher is approaching $1bn in revenue and growing at 4% a year, and Informa has started a formal process to separate it [8][6]. "We believe it will now benefit from greater flexibility and freedom through the next phase of its development, as Informa further expands the depth and reach of its B2B portfolio," Carter said of the publisher [9].
What to watch
- Any statement from Informa on who may exhibit at DSEI, including the Israeli state-owned suppliers, ahead of the 2027 London edition.
- How Informa funds the roughly £1.3bn of the price that the £940m placing does not cover, and at what cost.
- Whether more of Informa's Middle East events are rescheduled, given that India, the Middle East and Asia bring in more than a third of its revenue.