B2B information and events business Informa has bought catering industry content and events specialist Winsight for $380m.
Winsight’s brands include titles such as Foodservice Director and Restaurant Business and events like Retail Leader of the Year.
The company is based principally in Chicago and Washington DC and employs a workforce of some 300 people.
Informa said Winsight’s full-year earnings before interest, taxation, debt and amortisation (EBITDA) are expected to be greater than $35m.
Stephen Carter, the chief executive of Informa, said the cash acquisition was financed entirely from “in-year cash flow growth and our balance sheet”.
“Alongside technology, life sciences and aviation, this now adds foodservice to our roster of category leading B2B businesses with scale, international reach and an increasingly diversified service offering,” Carter said.
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Winsight is not Informa’s first entry into the catering information business. The publicly-listed company already owns titles including Restaurant Hospitality, Food Management and Supermarket News, as well as events Catersource and Create.
Informa said the purchase would create “a category leader offering a range of specialist B2B services, generating annual revenues of $115m+ in the US alone” and adding up to one million people to its pool of first-party data.
[Read more: Informa posts recession-busting profit update thanks to return of events]
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