ChoicePoint Acquired by LexisNexis Owner Reed Elsevier
Reed Elsevier Plc agreed to buy ChoicePoint Inc. for $3.5 billion, adding the biggest U.S. provider of information services for the insurance industry to its LexisNexis database.
Reed Elsevier will pay $50 a share in cash. The London-based company also will sell a unit that publishes 135 trade magazines including Variety, the bible of the U.S. entertainment industry.
Combining Alpharetta, Georgia-based ChoicePoint with the LexisNexis Risk Information and Analytics Group will create a risk-management business with $1.5 billion in sales, Reed Elsevier said today. The U.K. company also said 2007 net income rose to 1.2 billion pounds ($2.35 billion) from 623 million pounds a year earlier. Reed Elsevier had the biggest gain in three years in London trading.
"The acquisition fits well into Reed's strategy to expand the fast-growing data and analytics business,'' Paul Richards, a London-based analyst at Numis Securities, said in a phone interview with Bloomberg.
ChoicePoint's products include a system to estimate the risk of loss on commercial insurance, software to track claims, and an automated claims-application process. The company also searches legal documents at courthouses, screens prospective employees for corporations and does background checks on potential volunteers for charitable groups. ChoicePoint was spun off in 1997 from Equifax Inc., a consumer-credit reporting company in Atlanta.
Published on February 27, 2008
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