Fan Expo Parent To Buy AnimeNYC Parent For $2.6B
According to reports, Informa, the parent company of Fan Expo, will buy Clarion Events, the parent company of many event-focused subsidiaries, including LeftField Media, which owns AnimeNYC, Anime Frontier, AwesomeCon and Rose City Comic Con.
LeftField Media, a Connecticut-based company, was founded in 2014 by Greg Topalian, the founder of New York Comic Con, and a trio of executives from Business Journals Inc. (Ed. note: Full disclosure, I worked for Business Journals publications in Boston for decades.) In 2016, Topalian sold the company to Urban Expositions, a subsidiary of Clarion Events, in a deal that had the trio of co-founders bought out, and which left him as a minority owner of the company.
The website for LeftField Media states that the company had another co-founder, Kelly Comboni, who is listed on the site as President (with Topalian as CEO) but no reporting I’ve seen from the time of the sale to Clarion mentions her, and she is not listed as a founder on the company’s own LinkedIn page. The amount Clarion paid for LeftField Media was undisclosed.
Clarion Events owns many types of events aside from nerd-focused ones like the ones under LeftField Media, including international horse shows, car shows, travel shows and more. It hasn’t been made clear if the events from LeftField Media will be run by Fan Expo, and if so, if they will be rebranded. There is already a Fan Expo Portland in Portland, Ore., also the home of Rose City Comic Con, held at the same convention center.
According to the article from MarketBeat, the $2.6 billion represents approximately eight time Clarion’s overall adjusted earnings, after “cost and revenue synergies.” That is, layoffs.
It appears that, if they stay in business, AnimeNYC and Anime Frontier will be the only anime-focused events in the Informa/Fan Expo stable. All other Fan Expo events are general nerd and pop culture shows.
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