The acquisition is subject to US regulatory approval, which is expected to take a few weeks.
RISI is headquartered close to Boston in Bedford, Massachusetts in the USA, and employs around 150 staff located in offices around the world including Belgium, China, Brazil and Finland. Its product suite consists of pricing data, mill intelligence and analytics as well as news, research and conferences covering the pulp, packaging, wood products, wood fibre and saw logs markets.
RISI will join the Metal Bulletin group of businesses, which includes Metal Bulletin, American Metal Market (AMM), Industrial Minerals and the FastMarkets platform, in a newly formed Price Reporting Division, headed by Raju Daswani, who is also the Metal Bulletin ceo.
The Metal Bulletin group aims to provide leading pricing intelligence, including independent industry benchmarks, for the metal and mining industry. The group’s global portfolio of news, analysis, conferences and insight services complement these price benchmarks.
“The purchase of FastMarkets [last year], our investment in our pricing assessment and index technology systems, the changes to our organisational structure and all our staff’s collective hard work and commitment have contributed to the strength of our position as a PRA in the metals and mining markets,” Daswani said.
Combined with the existing pricing activities of the Metal Bulletin group, RISI’s addition to the Price Reporting Division will create a global and world-class cross-commodity PRA business within Euromoney, with over 350 employees and over 4,000 reference prices.
Andrew Rashbass, ceo of Euromoney, said: “The investment in RISI is another important step in Euromoney’s strategy of building a portfolio of leading price reporting agencies in growing international markets. RISI is a very high-quality business which Euromoney is perfectly placed to develop further. We look forward to working with RISI management and employees around the world to offer the company’s customers products of the highest value.”
The agreement to acquire RISI follows the acquisition in August last year of FastMarkets, a leading provider of real-time metals market pricing information, which has significantly enhanced Metal Bulletin’s position in price reporting.