LEXIS-NEXIS Acquires Online Services from the U.K.'s FT Group

Information Today, March, 2000 by Richard Poynder

LEXIS-NEXIS has acquired three online services from the U.K.-based Financial Times (FT) Group, including the proprietary online host FT Profile; FT Discovery, a fixed-price Web product; and FT News-Watch, an intranet current-awareness service. The three services formed the Business Information Products division (BIP) of the FT Group's Financial Times Electronic Publishing business.

The acquisition of BIP by LEXIS-NEXIS is one more step in the ongoing consolidation of the information industry, and was no doubt triggered in part by the recent joint venture between Dow Jones and Reuters in which the two companies' online business information services were merged into Factiva.

Commenting on the sale, Stephen Hill chief executive of the FT Group, said: "The FT Group's strategy is to be a leader in the provision of business information, comment, and analysis, with a global perspective. Our historic archive services have a strong niche but lack the scale required to compete successfully in the worldwide market."

Currently employing around 130 staff members, BIP has users in Europe and Asia, but little presence in the U.S. As such, the acquisition gives LEXIS-NEXIS a welcome boost to its European aspirations. "The deal gives us 3,000 new customers in Europe and Asia and significantly strengthens our position in European business information," said Jon Webb, managing director of LEXIS-NEXIS Europe.

As part of the deal, the FT Group will extend its existing license agreement to allow LEXIS-NEXIS to offer online access to the full text of the Financial Times newspaper in Europe. (Previously, distribution was limited to the U.S. and Asian markets.) Additionally, LEXIS-NEXIS' licensing agreements for the FT Group's European Intelligence Wire and Asia Intelligence Wire have been extended.

The acquisition itself, however, brings little in the way of new content to LEXIS-NEXIS--apart from the French newspaper Les Echos, the Spanish business paper Expansion, and a new FT Group product called Global Newswire.

For the FT Group, the sale provides an orderly exit from a business in which it was struggling to compete, allowing it to focus more sharply on its growing range of Web products targeted at end-users. This includes FT.com, the site of the Financial Times newspaper, and FTYourMoney.com, a personal finance site. The company has also just announced a $30 million equity stake in The Industry Standard, a U.S. Internet business magazine, and a joint venture with CBS to produce a European version of CBS.MarketWatch--a free Web-based financial and market news information service--to be called FTMarketwatch.com.

While the sale of BIP signals a farewell, to the traditional information industry for the FT Group, FT.com marketing communications director Paul Waddington stresses that it does not mean an exit from the archival database business. "The deal excludes the data production area of the business, including the Business Research Centre and World Reporter [the database jointly developed with Dialog and Dow Jones]--which is a key resource, both for licensing to third parties and also to drive the databases within FT.com."

Interestingly, the Global Archive that sits behind FT.com--which remains with the FT Group--is a subset of FT Profile and offers archival access to around 3,000 news-oriented sources. Additionally, while it is not being publicly stated, it seems likely that LEXIS-NEXIS may also begin to supply archival content to FT.com users in the future.

For the moment it is not known how BIP's products will be incorporated into the LEXIS-NEXIS operation. Nor is it clear what licensing implications there may be--not least in respect to World Reporter. "We will be working closely with our licenser partners in coming weeks to migrate the sources, and put them in both services where appropriate," said Webb. "It's too early to say whether we will face any difficulties over this."

The Products in More Detail

Originally three separate services (World Reporter, World Exporter, and Magic), FT Profile gained an early reputation for the breadth of its full-text sources and its simple but effective search capabilities. Over time the original MS-DOS commands have been supplemented with a Windows interface, but, despite several attempts and a great deal of development time, there is today still only a beta Web version of the service. Currently FT Profile provides access to around 7,000 sources, including newspapers and business journals, company profiles and financial information, industry and market reports, and sector and country analysis.

Released in 1995, FT Discovery is a Web-based desktop service that provides access to around 4,000 sources of business information, including the full text of the Financial Times, World Reporter, company reports, country and sector analysis, and real-time news.

FT NewsWatch, launched last year, is a current-awareness service that delivers news and information through corporate intranets. It includes content from the Financial Times and World Reporter, with an option to take Asia Intelligence Wire and China Intelligence Wire, too. Users are able to run preset searches that can be retrieved at any time from any location on the corporate intranet.