Here follows the transcription of the interview podcasted last week - for the audio click here.
We’re here today with Douglas Emslie, Chief Executive of Tarsus Group (LON:TRS) , £105m market cap company trading under the symbol TRS on the London Stock Exchange. The company trades on a forecast multiple of just over seven times consensus 2011 earnings of 18p and is paying a dividend yield of 4.7%. So Douglas, thanks for meeting with us today.
The team at Tarsus has great previous success at the Listed Exhibitions Group at Blenheim, which was sold to United News and Media for £600m or so in 1996 and you’ve continued that success with Tarsus. Can you tell a bit about your history and how that led to Tarsus starting up?
Absolutely, the history of Tarsus, you’re correct, goes way beyond the 12 years we’ve been in operation, it goes way back to Blenheim, and the businesses are totally different in that Blenheim was very much a feature of its time. It started in 1982 with Neville Buch and Laurie Lewis and had three or four fashion exhibitions in the UK, they built that up and floated it on the USM, as it was then, in 1986 on Big Bang Day. They built Blenheim up by making a number of major acquisitions and at that time that was unique, people didn’t understand that exhibitions were brands that could be bought and sold, so Neville Buch, our Chairman, and who was the Chairman of Blenheim, really was the first person to recognise that and take advantage of that and Blenheim was an acquisition vehicle and it consolidated a lot of the fantastic brands in the world that will never actually be transacted again. So it was unique but very much an acquisition - late ‘80s, early ‘90s - vehicle and, as you stated, it got taken over by United News and Media, or United Business Media (LON:UBM) as it is today, in 1996. And as a result of selling Blenheim our vision and starting task was to do something different, we didn’t want to repeat what Blenheim had done. Firstly we wanted to do something new and fresh and also we didn’t think it was possible to repeat that success story…
