B2B information. The £1.5bn Euromoney Institutional Investor Plc has acquired Random Lengths, a price reporting agency for global wood products industry, $18.2m (a multiple of 16.5x). The deal complements Euromoney’s acquisition last year of RISI pricing and intelligence for pulp, packaging and wood products. Euromoney is a publicly-listed B2B company whose portfolio includes: Euromoney, Institutional Investor, BCA Research and Metal Bulletin as well as events for the telecoms, financial and commodities markets. It was founded in 1969 by the Daily Mail group which, in 2016, sold-down its shareholding from 67% to 49% and relinquished its board places, effectively freeing Euromoney to develop independently for the first time. Until then, it had been assumed that one of the Daily Mail options had been to integrate Euromoney as the core of the B2B operations which already account for most of its profit. Now that Euromoney is “free” from its parent, the assumption must be that CEO Andrew Rashbass (ex The Economist and Reuters) will want to expand more quickly. Having quietly trimmed the portfolio and cut costs, will he buy one or more of the woefully under-loved, UK-listed B2B companies: Wilmington (£160m market cap), Centaur Media (£70m), or Ebiquity (£30m)? Some good strategies there.
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Euromoney adds forest data. What’s next?
