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Research Outline

Prepared for Aram | Delivered February 10, 2020

Meetings and Conference Market

Goals

Obtain additional instances of consolidation or fragmentation within the past five years in the meeting and conference industry. Obtain also examples of private capital investments in the meeting and conference industry in the last two years.

Early Findings

Meetings and Conference Market

Consolidation

  •  AEG Facilities, a venue management firm, has merged with SMG, a company managing a convention center, to establish a new company called ASM Global.
  • With this consolidation, the new company will now oversee over 300 convention venues.  
  •  Spacebase also acquired Okanda to gain an additional 1,600 stand-alone and hotel locations. Both provide room booking platforms.

Investments

  •  Freeman, an event management firm, has acquired Convention Data Services to improve its process of generating insights by linking attendee information and their event experience.
  • The company made this investment as its leaders realized that the registration process is tightly linked to an event's customer impression.
  • Freeman also acquired InfoSalon earlier as part of its investment strategy to acquire more digital registration tools to deliver more personalized events.

Summary of Findings

Our initial research provided some of the instances of consolidation and investments in the meeting and conference industry.