Informa plans to divest its business intelligence unit, including its nearly 300-year-old shipping news publication Lloyd's List.
The London-listed company revealed the effort to divest Informa Intelligence as part of a three-year growth and acceleration plan that it calls GAP II.
The planned divestment will see Informa focus on its academic publishing division and its business-to-business brands.
Slides for investors specify that all Informa Intelligence businesses are to be divested, including "vessel tracking", a reference to the wider Lloyd's List Intelligence division and its Seasearcher product.
Informa spokesman Richard Menzies-Gow confirmed to TradeWinds that Lloyd's List and associated brands are part of the sale effort, which he said has just begun.
Lloyd's List has a storied history in shipping news, having started in the 1700s as a posting of arrival and departure bulletins in Edward Lloyd's coffee house in London. After ceasing print publication in 2013, Lloyd's List continues as a leading digital provider of shipping news.
"As part of this investment and growth strategy, we are starting a process to divest our portfolio of high quality, high-performing brands in Informa Intelligence, thereby unlocking value and providing the funds to further strengthen our position in our two growth markets," said Stephen Carter, Informa's group chief executive.
Informa Intelligence has been the smaller of three key businesses in the Informa group, though the parent company said on Tuesday that investments in the division have transformed it into a high-value portfolio of brands as part of its GAP I growth plan launched in 2014.
"At Informa Intelligence, we have been rebuilding a business focused on specialist markets where we have established brands, high-quality data and specialist expertise," the company said in a November trading update.
"We have invested to build depth and capability in product management and expanded our customer service offering, leading to a consistent year-on-year improvement in performance."
Informa said on Tuesday that after the divestment closes, it intends to return £1bn ($1.32bn) in embedded value to shareholders through share buybacks and a special dividend.
Informa Intelligence earned £162m in revenue in the first half of this year, with £38.7m in operating profit.
