The European Commission has approved, under the EU Merger Regulation, the proposed acquisition of IHS Markit by S and P Global.
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The approval is conditional on the divestment of businesses in the areas of commodity price assessments and financial data.
S and P Global and IHS Markit are major global providers of commodity and financial data. The Commission's investigation focused on the global markets for commodity price assessments and market intelligence, as well as for credit ratings, financial data, indices, identifiers, and market intelligence products, especially in the loan value chain.
To address the Commission's competition concerns, S and P Global and IHS Markit offered the following commitments:
In commodity price assessments, the divestment of IHS Markit's Oil Price Information Service, including PetroChemWire, and Coal, Metals and Mining businesses. The divestment of OPIS and CMM fully removes the problematic overlap in relation to price assessments for oil, coal, biofuels and petrochemicals.
In financial data and infrastructure, the divestment of a number of S and P Global businesses.
The divestment of S and P Global's CUSIP issuance and data licensing business. This divestment covers the issuance and data licensing of loan CUSIP identifiers, and thus removes fully the overlap in the area of loan identifiers.
The divestment of S and P Global's leveraged loan 100 index family and its leveraged loan market intelligence product Loan Commentary and Data (LCD). This divestment fully removes the overlap between S and P Global and IHS Markit in relation to leveraged loan indices, and ensures that the merged entity will not have any incentive to foreclose competitors in leveraged loan market intelligence.
These businesses will have to be divested to one or more purchaser(s) to be approved by the Commission.
These structural commitments fully remove the competition concerns identified by the Commission in the markets for commodity price assessments, loan identifiers, leveraged loan indices and leveraged loan market intelligence.
The Commission therefore considered that the proposed transaction, as modified by the commitments, would no longer raise competition concerns. The decision is conditional upon full compliance with the commitments. ■