BusinessWeek receives multiple offers

Jon Fine of BusinessWeek reports that the weekly business magazine has received multiple acquisition offers, including from from Bloomberg.

Fine writes, “Other than Bloomberg, among the bidders — plural, as there are more than one — for BusinessWeek is OpenGate Capital, the private equity firm that owns TV Guide magazine.

“A bid from Bloomberg is widely expected to make the business information giant the prohibitive favorite to purchase BusinessWeek. (Caveat time: I write that phrase as one ignorant of the exact details of the bids for the magazine I work for. And if you’d asked me around a week ago who’d win BusinessWeek I’d have told you Lazard Chairman Bruce Wasserstein — who last Monday night decided against submitting a final bid.)

“The privately-held Bloomberg is reckoned to rake in well over $5 billion in revenue a year, the overwhelming majority of which comes from subscribers to its pricey terminals. It’s viewed as a company with both the resources to outbid most other comers and also one that has an existing infrastructure that many BusinessWeek operations can be folded into. (One other party who matches key portions of that profile, Morningstar founder and Inc. and Fast Company owner Joe Mansueto, has also explored a deal for BusinessWeek, but my hunch is that Mansueto passed on making a final bid.) Bloomberg operates a wire service, a Web site, a cable channel and Bloomberg Markets magazine. When I looked at their media operations, around a year ago, Bloomberg was employing 2,350 journalists—or around 15% more than the combined staffs New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. And Bloomberg’s staff has grown since then.”

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