TV18 buys Crisil MarketWire

TV18 buys Crisil MarketWire

Television Eighteen India (TV18) today announced acquisition of CRISIL MarketWire (CMW) from the rating agency CRISIL for an undisclosed amount.

Post acquisition - it will be effected from the next calendar year - the news agency will be rechristened NewsWire18.

The announcement marks the second acquisition of a news agency in a month after Zee took over UNI last month.

TV18 will acquire assets, liabilities and staff of CMW. It will also invest to transform CMW from a news agency to a data and news platform, the first indegenous platform to compete with foreign services such as Bloomberg and Reuters. Crisil Marketwire.

With 60 journalists across 9 bureaus in the country, CMW currently has 40% of institutional news market and is picked up by a bevy of brokerage houses, equity analysts and news channels. Pankaj Aher, currently CEO of CMW, would continue in his position in the new entity.

The data platform would be ready "fairly soon". Although he did not divulge the required investment for this, industry sources said putting the hardware in place would need nearly Rs 40 crore, Haresh Chawla, group CEO of TV 18, said.

" This transaction and the news and data platform complements our leadership brands in the financial news and information space and will help us extend our dominance to the institutional segment and serve it better," he said.

International credit rating agency Standard & Poor's (S&P) holds the majority stake in Crisil.

CMW is the new avatar of the erstwhile Bridge News. The core team of journalists from Bridge News shifted to Crisil in 2001 when the news agency closed shop in India and formed CMW. It used to support its news with database sourced from India Quotation System (IQS).

Reuters has recently bought IQS.

Commenting on the reasons of increased consolidation activity in the news agency segment, a sector analyst said that it was a highly attractive market and whose services were going to much in demand in the future.

The deal will come into effect from January 01, 2007 and follows an earlier decision of CRISIL and TVI8 to jointly develop a framework for business collaboration, stated a joint statement from the companies.

"The technology, reach, and content of TV18, and the CMW content and product will be a very good combination that will offer value to customers," R Ravimohan, CEO & MD of CRISIL, said.

CMW publishes the CMW MoneyWire, the CMW EquityWire, the CMW CommodityWire, and the CMW FundWire.

The news business will have its own real-time market data and news terminal that is sourced from Tenfore Systems.

Founded in 1989, Tenfore has direct end users in more than 60 countries, and boasts over 500 corporate clients including HSBC, ING and Rabobank and 45 wholesale / redistribution clients including Thomson Financial and GFI.

Tenfore is headquartered in the UK, with offices in Germany, The Netherlands, and Switzerland.

Raghav Bahl, MD of TV 18, said: "The strategic fit that the newswire business will provide to our existing business will create tremendous shareholder value. This acquisition marks an important milestone in our journey towards becoming a more integrated news company."

BS reported it first: Click here to read report