Dow Jones acquires Base Chemicals business

Dow Jones & Co. CEO Almar Latour sent out the following on Monday:

Colleagues,

News Corp and Dow Jones just announced an agreement to acquire the Base Chemicals business from S&P Global and IHS Markit.

Base Chemicals is a trusted source for pricing data, insights, analysis and forecasting for the world’s most important base chemicals, and it is a companion to our planned acquisition of OPIS, with customer overlap and shared capabilities.

The agreement to acquire Base Chemicals comes at a time of expansion and significant growth for our company, driven by a focus on recurring revenue; proprietary data and tools; unique, high-quality journalism; augmented customer reach and increased collaboration among our assets and people. Dow Jones today has a larger subscription base than ever before, and most of our business is digital. We will continue to invest in our capabilities in 2022.

Adding Base Chemicals to our business allows us to further expand into new customer segments and will bolster our plans to create a new energy, chemicals and renewables vertical to deliver valuable and trusted specialized content. Base Chemicals has extensive expertise in understanding markets and information gathering. That core capability is then enhanced with industry-leading analytics and forecasting, complemented by unmatched historical pricing and related industry data.

Along with the capabilities of The Wall Street Journal, Barron’s, MarketWatch, Investor’s Business Daily, Dow Jones Newswires, Factiva and OPIS, the Base Chemicals business will help Dow Jones customers navigate key issues of our time, including the ongoing transition to sustainability. This underscores our mission to provide the world’s most trusted journalism, data and analysis to help people make decisions.

We look forward to welcoming our new colleagues from Base Chemicals to Dow Jones next year and to offering our customers more in-depth analysis and information as the world focuses on sustainability in the years ahead.

Almar