An investor consortium including U.S. buyout firm Blackstone and Thomson Reuters, the publisher of Reuters News, is looking to sell around $3 billion worth of shares in the London Stock Exchange Group, according to a term sheet shared by an investment bank involved in the sale.
The accelerated stock offering, unveiled after the market close, includes some 28 million shares representing a voting interest of approximately 5.5% in the market infrastructure group.
Indicated demand from investors currently exceeds the size of the offer, one of the investment banks running the sale said shortly after the deal launch.
JPMorgan, Bank of America, Barclays and Citi are coordinating the deal.
Blackstone and Thomson Reuters did not immediately respond to a request for comment. LSEG declined to comment.
The news follows an earlier sale of more than $2 billion shares in March by Blackstone and Thomson Reuters, which became LSEG shareholders when they sold financial data firm Refinitiv to the bourse operator in 2021.
As of April 30, Thomson Reuters owned 47.4 million shares of LSEG, worth $5 billion, which it had indicated it would begin selling in tranches this year.
It also follows the publication of LSEG’s first-quarter earnings at the end of April, which showed an almost 14% jump in gross profit to 1.8 billion pounds ($2.27 billion) from a year ago.
LSEG has separately committed to buy up to 750 billion pounds of shares from the consortium through a targeted buy-back programme expected to be completed by April 2024.
Source: Reuters.com