Informa reveals growth acceleration plan and Taylor & Francis investment

Academic publisher Taylor & Francis will receive further investment from parent company Informa, as part of its three-year growth acceleration plan.

Stephen A Carter, group chief executive, said it would commit the group to "faster growth and increased investment" in academic and B2B markets where the company has "leading brands and leadership positions of scale".

He added: "As part of this investment and growth strategy, we are starting a process to divest our portfolio of high-quality, high-performing brands in Informa Intelligence, thereby unlocking value and providing the funds to further strengthen our position in our two growth markets. By concentrating on these growth markets, we will expand our academic and events businesses at pace through focused investment, accelerated digital growth and targeted acquisitions."

Informa will invest up to £150m in incremental capital and net operating expenditure through the 2021-24 period, funding programmes to expand its range of digital services and "accelerate the pace of underlying growth". It said this investment is expected to generate £150m–£200m of incremental revenue and a growing contribution to operating profit by 2024.

Informa said it will "further expand" its position in open research in academic markets and "strengthen" its service offering, extending its customer reach to double underlying growth to 4% by 2024.

A spokesperson for Taylor & Francis (T&F) said around 20% of the £150m total business investment would go into T&F to round off a 10-year modernisation programme.

They said: "The main focus of this investment is on four priorities driving customer value: data, automation, researcher services and customer personalisation. The data, automation and customer personalisation pieces of work are designed to complete our journey to becoming a digital-first business. In doing so we will be able to deliver a continuously improving digital customer experience which is needed to manage the complex and changing needs of knowledge makers to validate, connect and share their work.

“The researcher services investment will enable us to develop a range of Open Research formats. Open Access is an element of this, and we will be making specific investments to convert existing and launch new journal products. Beyond this we want to invest in Open Research in a much broader sense and produce research communication tools, such as those pioneered by F1000, that enable researchers across the broad range of communities in which we work to maximize the impact of their work in a way that suits theirs and their communities’ needs.”

Informa intends to return group revenues to above 2019 levels by the end of 2024, while returning significant capital to shareholders in 2022.

Revenue at Taylor & Francis fell 4.4% in the six months to 30th June 2021 compared to the same period in 2020, according to its most recent half-year results.