UBM H2 Trading In Line With Expectations

Since 1 July, United Business Media has made nine acquisitions for £104 million, bringing the number of acquisitions made in the year to date to 15 at a total cost of £152 million.

Returns from acquisitions continue to achieve or exceed the Group’s cost of capital. Disposals in 2006 have realised £60 million.

In the year to date UBM has returned a total of £152.3 million of capital to shareholders, in line with the intention announced in February 2006 to return in excess of £300 million of capital to shareholders by the end of 2007, subject to trading conditions.

In October, PR Newswire strengthened its position in the US non-regulatory news distribution market with the acquisition of US Newswire for $19 million (£11 million).

CMPMedica’s performance during the second half of 2006 was in line with expectations. CMPMedica’s France-based operations, from which the business derives more than half its profits, is performing well and growing. The performance in other geographies is mixed. In response to challenging UK and US markets, CMPMedica has accelerated its new product investment, particularly in event and data products, and in the vertical search product, SearchMedica.

David Levin, Chief Executive Officer, United Business Media plc said: “I am pleased that our trading performance continues to meet expectations. It’s particularly important that we’ve achieved this against a backdrop of the continuing strategic development of United Business Media’s businesses.

“Our strategy is to drive profitable growth by building leading positions in fast-growing geographical and vertical B2B media markets. We’re doing this through a combination of developing new products in-house, extending our existing products and by acquiring new products and businesses. We aim to meet the media needs of our customers in each of our markets with the right mix of events, online, print and embedded workflow data products.”