S&P, IHS to Divest Units to Satisfy Merger Conditions
(Reuters) -S&P Global and IHS Markit said on Monday they would sell a couple of businesses to satisfy antitrust requirements attached to the $44 billion merger of the financial information providers.
S&P Global will sell securities data solutions provider CUSIP Global Services (CGS) to financial data services firm FactSet for $1.93 billion in cash, while IHS will offload its Base Chemicals business to News Corp for $295 million.
The divestments come a month after the pair won U.S. antitrust approval for their planned merger, provided they sell certain businesses and scrap a non-compete agreement with a retail gasoline deals data provider.
While Base Chemicals provides price data and analysis on key industrial chemicals, CGS provides identifiers for financial instruments across exchanges around the world.
IHS and S&P Global said on Monday they expect their combined company to receive net sale proceeds of about $1.3 billion from these deals, which remain subject to further review and approval by antitrust regulators.
S&P Global also said it has pledged to sell its Leveraged Commentary and Data business, along with a related family of leveraged loan indices as a condition for regulatory approval.
(Reporting by Akash Sriram and Subrat Patnaik in Bengaluru; Editing by Ramakrishnan M.)
