On Friday 22 October, the European Commission approved the proposed acquisition of IHS Markit by S&P Global. The authorisation is conditional upon the divestment of activities in the commodity price assessment and financial data fields.
S&P Global and IHS Markit are major providers of global commodity and financial data.
The European Commission’s investigation raised concerns that the transaction would lead to reduced competition, resulting in potential price increases, fewer choices and less innovation in the markets, including price assessments for oil, coal, biofuels and petrochemicals.
S&P Global and IHS Markit provided the following commitments: - for commodity price assessments, the divestment of IHS Markit’s Oil Price Information Service (OPIS), including PetroChemWire, and the Coal, Metals and Mining (CMM) business; - for financial infrastructure and data, the divestment of several of S&P Global’s businesses: the divestment of S&P Global’s data issuance and licensing business for CUSIP identifiers (“CUSIP Global Services”) and the divestment of S&P Global’s Leveraged Loan 100 Index family and its Loan Commentary and Data (LCD) information product on the leveraged loan market.
S&P Global is an American company and IHS Markit is a British company. (Original version in French by Lionel Changeur)