Dow Jones & Co Inc has been talking to potential buyers about the sale of its stock market index business, including the Dow Jones industrial average, the company’s Wall Street Journal reported on its Web site.
WSJ.com, citing people familiar with the matter, reported on Friday that Goldman Sachs was leading the discussions on behalf of Dow Jones, a division of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp since it was purchased in 2007 for US$5.7 billion.
Since then, Murdoch has come under criticism for paying such a hefty price for a publishing company whose businesses have suffered from the sharp drop in ad sales. Earlier this year, News Corp wrote down US$2.8 billion in Dow Jones’ value.
Even though the index business is not dependent on advertising — making it a steadier revenue source during downturns — industry analysts never felt it was much favored by Murdoch, a passionate backer of newspapers and one of the best-known media moguls.
Indeed, a number of analysts expected him to consider a sale of the index business soon after striking the deal for Dow Jones. Representatives for News Corp declined to comment.
Potential buyers might include McGraw-Hill Co’s Standard & Poor’s, Russell Indexes, MSCI Inc, Bloomberg, Pearson PLC’s Financial Times and Thomson Reuters Corp. All of those companies declined to comment.
The Wall Street Journal, in its report, said the process was still in its early stages, and could result in an arrangement other than a sale, like a joint venture.
Anchored by the Dow Jones industrial average, the best-known measurement of US stocks, the company’s indexes business creates and licenses trading indexes.
Dow Jones Indexes has more than 700 licensees and a supporting staff of more than 160. It has offices in New York, Boston, Los Angeles, Princeton, London, Paris, Stockholm, Zurich, Madrid, Frankfurt, Hong Kong and Beijing.
Charles Dow, Edward Jones and Charles Bergstresser introduced the index in 1884, and today it contains such corporate blue-chips as General Electric Co, IBM and McDonald’s Corp.
Because the name is so well known — even if the index itself has been somewhat eclipsed by broader measurements like the Standard & Poor’s 500 in recent years — any buyer would face a dilemma: Change the name and use it for branding; or keep it, stick with tradition and miss out on the opportunity to market a new brand.
Super Typhoon Kong-rey is the largest cyclone to impact Taiwan in 27 years, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said today. Kong-rey’s radius of maximum wind (RMW) — the distance between the center of a cyclone and its band of strongest winds — has expanded to 320km, CWA forecaster Chang Chun-yao (張竣堯) said. The last time a typhoon of comparable strength with an RMW larger than 300km made landfall in Taiwan was Typhoon Herb in 1996, he said. Herb made landfall between Keelung and Suao (蘇澳) in Yilan County with an RMW of 350km, Chang said. The weather station in Alishan (阿里山) recorded 1.09m of
NO WORK, CLASS: President William Lai urged people in the eastern, southern and northern parts of the country to be on alert, with Typhoon Kong-rey approaching Typhoon Kong-rey is expected to make landfall on Taiwan’s east coast today, with work and classes canceled nationwide. Packing gusts of nearly 300kph, the storm yesterday intensified into a typhoon and was expected to gain even more strength before hitting Taitung County, the US Navy’s Joint Typhoon Warning Center said. The storm is forecast to cross Taiwan’s south, enter the Taiwan Strait and head toward China, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. The CWA labeled the storm a “strong typhoon,” the most powerful on its scale. Up to 1.2m of rainfall was expected in mountainous areas of eastern Taiwan and destructive winds are likely
The Central Weather Administration (CWA) yesterday at 5:30pm issued a sea warning for Typhoon Kong-rey as the storm drew closer to the east coast. As of 8pm yesterday, the storm was 670km southeast of Oluanpi (鵝鑾鼻) and traveling northwest at 12kph to 16kph. It was packing maximum sustained winds of 162kph and gusts of up to 198kph, the CWA said. A land warning might be issued this morning for the storm, which is expected to have the strongest impact on Taiwan from tonight to early Friday morning, the agency said. Orchid Island (Lanyu, 蘭嶼) and Green Island (綠島) canceled classes and work
KONG-REY: A woman was killed in a vehicle hit by a tree, while 205 people were injured as the storm moved across the nation and entered the Taiwan Strait Typhoon Kong-rey slammed into Taiwan yesterday as one of the biggest storms to hit the nation in decades, whipping up 10m waves, triggering floods and claiming at least one life. Kong-rey made landfall in Taitung County’s Chenggong Township (成功) at 1:40pm, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. The typhoon — the first in Taiwan’s history to make landfall after mid-October — was moving north-northwest at 21kph when it hit land, CWA data showed. The fast-moving storm was packing maximum sustained winds of 184kph, with gusts of up to 227kph, CWA data showed. It was the same strength as Typhoon Gaemi, which was the most
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