Thomson Corp. won antitrust approval to buy Reuters Group PLC from U.S. and European regulators after the companies agreed to sell copies of four financial databases.
The $15.4 billion combination will create the biggest financial-information provider. The companies will allow rivals access to databases covering earnings estimates, corporate and economic information to overcome European Commission and U.S. Department of Justice antitrust concerns. Canadian regulators also approved the sale.
“Thomson and Reuters have to make only minor concessions,” said Alexander Wisch, an analyst at Standard & Poor’s Equity Research in London, in a telephone interview Tuesday. He recommends investors buy Reuters shares. “The impact on the combined business will be negligible.”
The acquisition of London-based Reuters, a 156-year-old news organization with 2,400 journalists in more than 130 countries, will increase Toronto-based Thomson’s sales to $11 billion and triple its share of the financial data market to 34 percent.
Thomson owns the Westlaw legal database and TradeWeb bond-trading network.
The transaction will save $500 million a year in expenses, according to Thomson and Reuters. The new company, to be led by Reuters chief executive Thomas Glocer, would surpass Bloomberg LP’s market share of 33 percent, according to 2006 figures compiled by Inside Market Data, an industry newsletter.
Based on Thomson’s Feb. 15 closing stock price, the acquisition’s value has declined to $15.41 billion from nearly $17 billion when the cash and stock agreement was announced in May.
Bloomberg, the parent of Bloomberg News, competes with Reuters and Thomson in selling information and trading systems to the financial-services industry, and with Westlaw in providing information to the legal community.
Thomson will sell a copy of its Thomson Fundamentals database, and Reuters will sell a copy of its databases for estimates, after-market research and economics, the companies said in a statement Tuesday.
