Hyve Group Expands into Healthcare with HLTH Acquisition
By: Jacob Cohen Donnelly
The health industry is big money. And UK-based Hyve Group is getting a very large piece of it with the acquisition of HLTH, an events company with major trade shows in the United States and Europe.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed. In a statement, Hyve Group’s CEO, Mark Shashoua said:
By applying Hyve’s tried and tested centralized best practice model, and using our expertise in scaling meetings programms, we can support the continued creation of return on investment for HLTH customers.
This is Hyve Group’s first step into the healthcare industry, adding both HLTH as well as the ViVE show to its portfolio. According to the statement, HLTH USA becomes the largest revenue driver for Hyve Group with ViVE “not far behind.” With this deal comes a team of over 80 employees across New York, London and Dublin.
This is not the first time that HLTH’s founder, Jonathan Weiner, has built and sold a conference and media business. He sold Prepaid Expo and Paybefore to Informa in 2007 and 2011 respectively, Money20/20 to Ascential in 2014; Shoptalk to Hyve Group in 2019, and now HLTH to Hyve once again.
Hyve, itself, has been on its own M&A journey. Started in 1991 as ITE, its initial strategy was to develop events in regions formerly part of the Soviet Union. In 2021, following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, it sold all of its assets in the two countries. It reportedly generated 72 million pounds ($93.96 million) for the Russian assets and “up to 3 million pounds ($3.59 million) from the sale, which will be paid annually until September 2027 based on the Ukrainian operations’ profitability.”
But the biggest deal of its existence was its own acquisition. In June 2023, Providence Equity, in partnership with Searchlight Capital Partners, agreed to buy Hyve, valuing the company at £524 million ($660.24m) on an enterprise value basis, taking the company private exactly 25 years after it had gone public on the London Stock Exchange.
This enterprise value implied an EV/EBITDA multiple of 22.1 Hyve’s EBITDA for the 12 months to September 20, 2022, suggesting that the business had generated £23.7m in that period on a reported £122.5m in revenue. This, in and of itself, was a strong return from its Covid years, when it only generated £21.8m in total revenue in 2021.
According to a company blog post in December 2023, management reported that Hyve had generated 35% like-for-like organic growth, which would imply that the business generated £165.4 million last year. If EBITDA margins had stayed constant, that would suggest ~£32 million last year.
The acquisition of HLTH marks the second acquisition of the year for the UK organizer. In July, it purchased POSSIBLE, a marketing event that had only just completed its second iteration. In 2023, POSSIBLE had approximately 2,400 attendees and this grew 49% to 3,600 in 2024. Terms of that deal were not revealed, but Digiday reported a purchase price of $40 million.
Both acquisitions fit a strategy that Hyve has been on since founder Mark Shashoua returned to the company. In a 2022 interview with Flashes & Flames, he said:
The [Transformation and Growth] programme changed the shape of the portfolio by managing out those events which weren’t up to market-leading quality and by acquiring events which were, and which would benefit from the scalable platform we had created.
…
This resulted in our portfolio being streamlined, going from 269 events each with an average revenue of £500k, to 50 shows which now have an average revenue of £3.3. In addition, we shifted from nearly 90% of our business being located in emerging markets to the exact opposite, with over 90% now being rooted in advanced economies. We have evolved our offering to customers by adopting an omnichannel strategy, rolling out meeting programmes both in person and online.
Clearly, the HLTH conference fits this portfolio.
As for HLTH’s Weiner, he will be sticking around at HLTH, but has also begun running a similar playbook again with the launch of Human[X], an AI event. Its inaugural event will be held in Las Vegas on March 10-13, 2025 with early bird tickets costing over $2,500 a pop. When the strategy works, why deviate?
