Emerald and Questex now sit under a single parent company called Forge, unveiled on 19 August, two months after Apollo managed funds closed on both businesses. Around 160 events changed corporate owner. If you exhibit at Outdoor Retailer, KBIS, Advertising Week, The Hospitality Show or Bar & Restaurant Expo, the name on your stand contract stays put. The company signing it does not.
Forge calls itself the largest B2B events and media company headquartered in North America, a carefully worded claim given that Informa and RX are both larger and both based elsewhere. Paul Miller, previously chief executive of Questex, runs it. TSNN reported the structure and PCMA confirmed the leadership and board the same week.
What actually changed, and what did not
Very little that an attendee would notice, and quite a lot that a finance director would.
| Item | Detail |
|---|---|
| New parent brand | Forge, announced 19 August 2026 |
| Events in the combined portfolio | Approximately 160 |
| Chief executive | Paul Miller, formerly of Questex, appointed June 2026 |
| Owner | Funds managed by Apollo |
| Emerald purchase price | $1.5 billion, at $5.03 per share |
| Questex purchase price | Undisclosed |
| Both deals closed | July 2026 |
| Event brand names | Unchanged |
Keeping the show names is the standard and correct move. Trade show equity lives in the event, not the holding company, and nobody books a stand because they admire the parent's brand promise. Forge's is "Moving Markets", which will appear on precisely no exhibitor purchase orders.
What this means for exhibitors and sponsors
Ownership changes rarely announce themselves through a price list. They show up in the small print of the renewal you sign fourteen months out. Three things typically shift after a portfolio consolidates under private equity, and none of them are secrets:
Bundling. Floor space starts arriving attached to digital media, lead packages and year round content. Sometimes that is genuine value. Sometimes it is a way to raise the effective rate per square metre without touching the headline rate per square metre.
Data. A larger group can tell you more about who walked your stand, which is useful, and can also charge you for the privilege, which is less so.
Calendar tidying. Overlapping shows in adjacent markets get merged, moved or quietly retired. If two events you exhibit at now share an owner, assume at least one conversation about combining them has happened.
Nobody renews a stand because the parent company has a new logo. They renew because the buyers in the aisle were worth the freight bill, and that calculation is unchanged by anything announced this week.
The board is the real announcement
Corporate brand launches are noise. Board appointments are signal, and this board is unusually legible. The independent directors are Andy Bird, former president of Walt Disney International and former chief executive of Pearson; Lara Boro, former chief executive of The Economist Group and of Informa Intelligence; and Simon Kimble, former chief executive and executive chairman of Clarion Events.
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Read those three CVs together and the strategy stops being mysterious. Two of the three come from subscription information businesses rather than from exhibitions. One built one of Europe's most acquisitive show organisers. That is a board assembled to turn event audiences into year round data and media revenue, with a proven buyer of shows on hand for when the next portfolio comes up. Exhibitors should expect the pitch to move from "book the hall" toward "book the audience relationship", and should price that pitch on its merits rather than its adjectives.
The wider run this fits into
Forge did not appear in a vacuum. 2026 has been a relentless year for exhibitions M and A: Easyfairs bought The AI Conference in San Francisco in early August, Life Science Connect completed two acquisitions inside a month in July, and the listed groups kept posting growth, with RELX exhibitions up 6% underlying and Informa's B2B live events division up 8% in the first half.
Which makes one counterexample from the same month worth holding onto. NY NOW, a century old show, left a 140 event portfolio for independent ownership and then grew buyer attendance at its summer edition. Scale is an advantage in this business. It is not the only one, and it is not a guarantee.
What to do before your next renewal lands
Nothing dramatic. Just the housekeeping that consolidation makes worth doing properly:
Get your own attendance and lead numbers from your own systems, not only from the organiser's post show report. Owning your registration and check in data is what turns a renewal conversation into a negotiation.
Separate the line items. Ask what the space costs, what the media costs and what the data costs, individually, before agreeing to a package.
Check the cancellation and rebooking terms carefully in the first cycle after an ownership change, because that is when they tend to get rewritten.
Benchmark. If a show's rate rises faster than its qualified buyer count, that is a fact you can bring to the table, and a reason to look at what your own events cost to run by comparison.
For most organisers reading this, Forge changes nothing tomorrow. It changes the balance of the room in about a year, when the renewal arrives with a bigger company behind it and a slightly longer list of things attached to the floor space. The exhibitors who do well out of consolidation are simply the ones who walked in already knowing what their own numbers said.
