It will be a challenge to find the right buyer for these products. |
The U.S. economy is more integrated into the world and wealthier individuals have the ability to learn languages and travel internationally. They can take advantage of their resources. |
They are the most natural strategic buyer for these events because of their strength in design engineering and manufacturing, but I don't think they'd have interest in buying shows that are declining. |
What [Reed] announced is they have a defined group of vertical shows. It's not an independent company with an existing infrastructure and management and accounting, and enough scale necessarily to be a platform. A financial buyer would have to build the infrastructure around it. It's much easier in a 'carve-out' situation like this for a strategic buyer that already has that infrastructure and overhead and back office to be able to absorb new products. |