Trends in business information, provision and use
Jinfo Blog

By Pam Foster

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The VIP publications, VIP and VIP Eye, are concerned with the business information industry - its products, its providers and its users <http://www.vivaVIP.com/>. VIP Eye provides news and analysis of the sector every two weeks and this article analyses the VIP Eye content for the first quarter of 2006, to reveal a number of emerging trends:

Boom in M&A extends to business information sector

The first quarter of 2006 witnessed a boom in the number of mergers & acquisitions in Europe, representing $433 billion worth of deals - double the amount for the same period last year. According to the weekly newspaper Financial News (3 April 2006), Europe's M&A market will outstrip the US as the boom continues into next year. The business information sector is playing its part, although deal activity extends beyond Europe. The following describes some of the more important deals for the first quarter of 2006:

• FactSet buys europrospectus to gain hard-to-find equity, fixed income and derivatives prospectuses. FactSet <http://www.factset.com/>, the US aggregator of financial and economic data, has bought the UK-based company europrospectus.com
  
  <http://www.europrospectus.com/> for approximately $7.5 million. europrospectus.com provides access to hard-to-find prospectuses and the clauses within them, via text, field and clause searches. Its web product, prospectus+, offers over 25,000 prospectuses of debt, equity, warrant and M&A deals, to which about 2,500 new ones are added every week. The acquisition will enable europrospectus to expand its service to a much wider market and, at the same time, will provide FactSet with access to hard-to-find equity, fixed income and derivatives prospectuses. prospectus+, together with Perfect Information's prospectus product, Perfect DEBT, were the subjects of a comparative and in-depth review, published in the September 2005 issue of VIP. Further information and a Table of Contents for VIP no.22 are available at: <http://www.vivaVIP.com/>.
  
  
• Merger talks put Hemscott's plans on hold. Hemscott's <http://www.hemscott.com/> plans for a de-listing have been put on hold amid talks of a merger. At the beginning of the year, the financial information company announced that it was planning to de-list from AIM in order to take the company private again. Since then, exploratory discussions have developed with a third party which could lead to a merger. As a result of this uncertainty, the Board believes it would be inappropriate to proceed with the proposal for the tender offer and the cancellation of trading on AIM, until the outcome of these discussions has been determined. Before talk of a merger emerged, the Hemscott Board was seeking appropriate shareholder consents to proceed with the tender offer at 40p per share. Minority shareholders attacked Hemscott Chairman Michael Grade as they believed that the share price offer was too low. The company's majority shareholders, Veronis, Suhler Stevenson, and Finmedia were reported as being happy to hold on to their shares.
  
  
• US consortium displays interest in acquiring Equifax. A consortium of US equity firms, including Hellman & Friedman <http://www.hf.com/> and Kohlberg Kravis Roberts <http://www.kkr.com/>, are reported to be getting together a GBP6 billion bid for the credit checking service Experian <http://www.experian.com/>. Last year, GUS, the owner of Experian, said that it was looking to benefit shareholders by dismantling the company. Analysts have valued Experian at GBP6.4 billion. Over the last few years, Experian has moved into other markets besides credit checking, thanks to GBP1 billion worth of acquisitions. Last year, it reported sales of GBP2.7 billion.
  
  
• D&B acquires Open Ratings. D&B <http://www.dnb.com/> has acquired Open Ratings <http://www.openratings.com/> for $8 million in cash. Open Ratings provides web-based supply risk management products and is a good fit for D&B, who will combine Open Rating's analytical capabilities in supply risk management with its DUNSRIGHT capabilities. D&B says that it expects the deal to reduce its 2006 earnings by about 2 cents a share, most of which will be in the first half, and add to its 2007 earnings.
  
  
• Sale of mergermarket confirmed. dot.com investor NewMedia Spark <http://www.newmediaspark.com/> has confirmed that mergermarket <http://www.mergermarket.com/>, one of its main holdings, is up for sale. mergermarket's products include a M&A data service and a number of products that service the hedge fund sector. Over the last seven years, the business has expanded to provide coverage across Europe, Americas, Latin America and the Asia-Pacific regions. The NewMedia Spark Board says that it believes that were a disposal to occur, it would be at a significant premium to the GBP13 million book value of its fully diluted 24% stake in mergermarket, reported in its interim accounts as at 30 September 2005. The three founder members of mergermarket own less than half of the equity, with the other more than 50% being owned by NewMedia Spark and Beringea. <http://www.beringea.com/>. Potential buyers had until the end of April to submit preliminary bids.
  
  

Content is increasingly being given away for free

New business models mean that information companies are increasingly offering free content. HighBeam has increased, substantially, the amount of free content it offers. Congoo, a new search engine, provides free content from premium providers, and Google Finance provides a mix of free data, interactive charts and blog postings.

From the outset, HighBeam <http://www.highbeam.com/> has always adopted a hybrid business model, offering a mix of paid for and free access to research tools and a collection of proprietary databases, including the HighBeam Library (formerly eLibrary.com), which comprises an archive of more than 35 million documents from more than 3,000 sources, going back as far as 20 years.

The company has added more free content, and it now offers 1.5 million free full-text articles to both registered and unregistered users. The items are from more than 200 sources which include well known titles such as Business Wire, Financial Management, and USA Today. Additionally, HighBeam has begun spidering and linking to free publications on the open web, covering areas in which users have expressed an interest. Searches retrieve a mix of free and premium content. However, a 'modify results' box enables you to view only the free items.

HighBeam will be hoping that its new free content will attract more fee-paying subscribers to the service. Membership is low cost at $19.95 per month or $99.95 a year. Further information about HighBeam and its free content is available in VIP Eye, No 51, 10 February 2006.

Congoo <http://www.congoo.com/> is a new search engine that provides individuals with free access to premium sources of business information from the likes of FT.com, Business Wire, TheStreet.com, Institutional Investor, Morningstar, and PR Newswire, as well as trade mags such as Adweek, Brandweek.com, Billboard.com, and Editor & Publisher.

In order to access the free content, users need to download NetPass, a free web toolbar that can be installed on both Explorer and Firefox. Publishers vary in the number of free items they offer each month, with some providing 10 and others 15. Congoo says that many additional sources of premium content will be added during the coming weeks and months.

Congoo looks to be an attractive proposition for users who require occasional business information from reputable sources. Further information on Congoo and its sources is available in VIP Eye, No. 54, 27 March 2006.

Google has launched a beta version of Google Finance <http://finance.google.com/finance>, a new service aimed at investors. The initial service provides information on North American stocks only but coverage will be extended to Europe and other regions shortly.

The interface is simple and navigation is easy. At first glance the site looks very similar to rival sites offered by Yahoo! and MSN but closer inspection reveals some attractive differences. Stock charts are interactive, for instance, and, by scrolling over the chart, users can display historic price and volume data, dating back several years. The chart is also linked to a display of news stories. However, there is no advanced charting functionality available.

Unlike Yahoo! Finance, Google Finance allows users to search by company name. On Yahoo! the search is restricted to ticker only. More importantly, unlike Yahoo!, Google Finance also provides some data on private companies and public companies that aren't listed on US exchanges, such as Boots Group Plc. The addition of blog postings will be welcomed by users, as they can often be an important and useful source of content and opinion on companies and their brands.

The source of the data is a mix of licensed content and content crawled and indexed from the web. Company profile, financial and management data is from Reuters, with other data supplied by a variety of sources.

HighBeam, Congoo and Google Finance, plus others like them, are likely to prove popular with small and medium-sized users of business information. Traditional aggregators may find themselves increasingly squeezed by such services and, in particular, they may well experience declining revenues for their pay-as-you-go services, as users defect to free and hybrid services.

Providers increasingly meeting demands for Eastern European data

Demand for data on Eastern European companies and banks is being met by new products from Bureau van Dijk Electronic Publishing (BvDEP) and the Interfax Centre for Economic Analysis (Interfax-CEA).

RUSLANA, from BvDEP <http://www.bvdep.com/>, provides standardised and "as reported" data for nearly 1 million companies. This total includes approximately 600,000 Russian companies and over 260,000 Ukrainian companies, with summary data available for a further 100,000 Ukrainian corporations. Data is supplied by Creditreform, an existing partner of BvDEP.

Added value is provided by supplementary data which includes BvDEP's ownership research, a news section that includes M&A activity, management, import/export details, and stock price data. Up to 10 years of information is provided for each company.

RUSLANA is the first product to be launched on BvDEP's new platform. The new front-end is described as being more streamlined and intuitive, while still retaining the advanced search, analytical and graphical functionality, for which BvDEP is best known. The new platform will be the feature of an in-depth review in a forthcoming issue of VIP <http://www.vivaVIP.com/>.

Further information about RUSLANA and BvDEP's new platform is available in VIP Eye, No. 52, 24 February 2006.

The Interfax-1000-CIS Banks Review, from Interfax-CEA, compares all of the major banks in Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan and other CIS countries, in terms of asset value and other financial indicators. It provides information on assets, capital, loan portfolios and funds raised for 1,000 CIS banks (815 Russian; 185 from other CIS countries). Further information is available in VIP Eye, No. 52, 24 February 2006.

Although a mature sector, recent activity proves that the business information industry is still evolving. The next quarter will witness further consolidation and the issue of free content will continue to play a part in changing business models. As usual, we'll be reporting on and analysing these changes as they happen.

Related FreePint links:

• "European Unions: what you need to know about international mergers and acquisitions" by Jill Fenton < http://www.freepint.com/issues/130406.htm#feature>
  
  
• 'Information and Libraries' articles in the FreePint Portal <http://www.freepint.com/go/p113>
  
  
• Post a message to the authors, Pam Foster, or suggest further resources at the FreePint Bar <http://www.freepint.com/bar>
  
  
• Read this article online, with activated hyperlinks <http://www.freepint.com/issues/050406.htm#feature>
  
  
• Access the entire archive of FreePint content <http://www.freepint.com/portal/content/>
  
  

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