Event phasing across reporting periods and why half year numbers mislead by design

The interim results go out and the trade press writes that the group grew 11 per cent in the first half. Inside the business everyone knows the year is flat. Nobody lied, nobody made an error, and the two statements describe the same portfolio.

Event phasing across reporting periods does this every year to organisers who report halves, and the fix is not a better forecast. It is a disclosure the group has to choose to make, because the accounting is working exactly as intended and producing a number that misleads by construction.

What phasing actually is

Revenue for an exhibition lands when the show is staged. Move the show and you move the revenue, and a portfolio has shows moving for entirely ordinary reasons: a venue offering a different week, a biennial cycling in or out, a launch scheduled for autumn instead of spring, a show acquired mid year that brings four editions with it.

Emerald Holding puts the effect on the record in its Form 10-Q for the quarter ended 30 June 2025, describing its business as seasonal, with trade show revenues typically reaching their highest levels during the first and fourth quarters of each calendar year, entirely due to the timing of its trade shows. The word entirely is doing real work in that sentence. There is no demand cycle behind the seasonality. It is a calendar.

That is the honest starting point. Any comparison of two periods in an event business is a comparison of two different sets of shows unless somebody has deliberately made it otherwise.

How a listed group reports it

Informa publishes the cleanest worked version of this in its 2025 full year results, released on 12 March 2026. The group states that underlying figures are adjusted for acquisitions and disposals, the phasing of events including biennials, the impact of changes from new accounting standards and policy changes, and the effects of currency. It then gives the reconciliation as a table of four adjustments between underlying and reported growth.

For 2025 the line reads: underlying growth 6.3 per cent, phasing and other items 1.3 per cent, acquisitions and disposals 8.0 per cent, currency change minus 1.9 per cent, reported growth 13.7 per cent. Add those four adjustments to the underlying figure and you get the reported one exactly, which is the property a reconciliation needs and often lacks.

For 2024 the same line reads: underlying 11.6 per cent, phasing and other items minus 3.4 per cent, acquisitions and disposals 7.0 per cent, currency minus 3.8 per cent, reported 11.4 per cent.

Look at what phasing did across those two years. It took 3.4 points off growth in 2024 and added 1.3 points in 2025, a swing of 4.7 percentage points between consecutive years. On a group reporting revenue of 4,041.4 million pounds in 2025 against 3,553.1 million in 2024, 4.7 per cent of the prior year base is about 167 million pounds of apparent movement with no trading behind it.

Informa also defines what the adjustment does, saying that phasing and biennial adjustments relate to the alignment of comparative period amounts to the usual scheduling cycle of events in the current year. That is the mechanism: the comparative moves, the current year stays put.

Why does a flat year read as growth at the half?

Work it through on a portfolio small enough to hold in your head.

Eight shows, full year revenue of 52.4 million, exactly the same total as last year. Last year the first half held 29.8 million and the second held 22.6 million. This year one autumn show moved to June, so the first half holds 33.1 million and the second holds 19.3 million.

First half growth is 33.1 divided by 29.8, which is 11.1 per cent. Second half growth is 19.3 divided by 22.6, which is minus 14.6 per cent. Full year growth is zero.

Every one of those three numbers is correct. The first will be reported in July and believed. The second will be reported in February and explained away. The third is the only one that describes the business, and it arrives eight months after the first.

The damage is not confined to external reporting. Internal targets get set off the interim number, bonus accruals get booked against it, and the audience acquisition budget for the second half gets approved on the strength of a first half that borrowed a show from it.

The asymmetry two groups have chosen differently

Here is a detail worth arguing about, and two large groups have landed in different places on it.

RELX, in its results for the year to 31 December 2025, states that underlying revenue growth rates exclude exhibition cycling, and that underlying adjusted operating profit growth rates are calculated on the same basis except that they do not exclude exhibition cycling. So the group adjusts revenue for event timing and leaves profit unadjusted. In the same results RELX reports that disposals, exhibition cycling and the step down in print and print related revenue together reduced group revenue by 3 per cent.

Informa applies its phasing adjustment to both revenue and adjusted operating profit, and publishes both reconciliations.

I prefer Informa's treatment, and the reason is practical. A show that cycles out takes its contribution with it, and contribution margins on exhibitions are high enough that the profit effect of phasing is proportionally larger than the revenue effect. Adjusting one and not the other produces an underlying revenue growth and an underlying profit growth that are measured on different sets of shows, and a reader comparing the two is comparing things that were never lined up. If you adjust at all, adjust consistently, and if the profit adjustment is hard to compute reliably, say so on the page instead of quietly omitting it.

What to publish alongside the results

An organiser that is not a listed group can still fix this, and the fix costs a page.

Publish the event calendar by reporting period, current year and comparative, with the revenue of each edition against it. A reader can then see that the first half contained five shows this year and four last year, and the 11.1 per cent becomes self explanatory before anyone has to defend it in a meeting.

Publish a like for like figure limited to shows that ran in both periods. In the example above that comparison covers 29.8 million against a matching 29.8 million and shows zero, which is the truth. Constructing this properly when the portfolio has also been bought and sold is its own discipline.

Publish the phasing effect as a number, not as a caveat in the narrative. A sentence saying results were affected by the timing of events is worth nothing. A line saying event phasing added 3.3 million to first half revenue is checkable and it survives being quoted.

How do you set targets when the calendar moves?

Most of the pain from phasing arrives through targets rather than through reporting, because a target set in November against one calendar gets measured in July against another.

The mechanism that works is to set targets per edition and let the periods take whatever falls into them. Each show carries its own revenue and contribution target, agreed with the show director, tied to that edition's dates. The half year target is then a sum of the editions scheduled to land in that half, computed at the point the calendar is fixed and recomputed whenever a date changes.

Recomputing is the part teams skip, and it is the whole point. In the eight show example above, the first half target should have risen by the full 3.3 million the moment the autumn show moved to June, and the second half target should have fallen by the same amount. Leave the targets where they were and the first half team gets a windfall of 3.3 million against plan while the second half team carries a shortfall of the same size, and both variances are pure calendar.

There is a governance point buried in this. If a date change moves a target, then whoever approves date changes is implicitly moving targets, and that authority should be explicit. In practice a date is often agreed between a show director and a venue nine months before anyone in finance hears about it. A two line note attached to every date change, naming the revenue moving and the periods affected, is enough to close that gap.

Where this stops

Phasing adjustments are a judgement, and the judgement is exercised by the party being measured. That is a real weakness and it is worth being blunt about.

There is no standard that defines a phasing adjustment. It is an alternative performance measure, and the choices inside it, which shows count as cycling, whether a date move of three weeks across a period end qualifies, how a launch is treated in its first year, are all made by the preparer. Informa's disclosure notes that where an event scheduled for 2024 or 2025 was cancelled or postponed, no adjustment was made and the impact fell on underlying growth. That is a defensible choice and a different group could defend the opposite one.

The second limit is that adjusting for phasing removes information as well as noise. A group that keeps moving shows out of a half is doing something real, whether that is chasing better venue rates or reacting to a competitor, and the cash arrives on the calendar rather than on the adjusted basis. Someone has to look at the unadjusted numbers too, and covenant tests and working capital do not care what the underlying figure was.

Before the next interim close, build one table with the current and prior period event calendars side by side and the revenue of each edition against it, and total the shows that appear in only one of the two columns. That total is your phasing exposure for the period, and if it is larger than the growth you are about to report, the growth number should not go out on its own. The recognition rule that creates this in the first place is worth understanding separately, as is the specific case of a date move crossing a financial year end, and both sit in the same event finance territory as the biennial cycling adjustment.