Source: United States Department of Justice 2
The Department of Justice announced today that it will require S&P Global Inc. (S&P) to divest three of IHS Markit Ltd.’s (IHSM) price reporting agency (PRA) businesses to resolve antitrust concerns arising from their proposed $44 billion merger. PRAs provide critical price discovery for numerous commodity markets, including markets where trades are done off-exchange in private transactions that are not subject to reporting obligations. The divestitures of Oil Price Information Services (OPIS), Coals, Metals, and Mining (CMM), and PetrochemWire (PCW) will maintain competition in PRA services and protect customer access to essential pricing information. In addition, the department will require OPIS to end a 20-year non-compete with GasBuddy, a popular crowd-sourced retail gas price information app that has long provided OPIS with pricing data for resale to commercial customers. This non-compete has effectively prevented GasBuddy — a company well positioned to enter the retail gas price data market — from launching a data service that would compete with OPIS.