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The
$44 billion deal was initially announced in November 2020.
To win approval for the deal, the companies agreed to sell three
of IHS Markit's price reporting agency (PRA) businesses. The
department said the businesses are: Oil Price Information
Services (OPIS); Coals, Metals, and Mining (CMM); and
PetrochemWire (PCW).
The businesses will be bought by News Corp under a $1.15 billion
deal reached in August.
In a court filing, the Justice Department said that S&P Global
and IHS are a small number of companies that provide PRA
services and "compete vigorously in each of the relevant
markets, resulting in lower prices and increased quality and
innovation for PRA customers."
One of them, OPIS, collects and sells information related to
U.S. retail gasoline prices. GasBuddy has been one of OPIS' main
sources of data since 2009. Since 2016, OPIS has had exclusive
rights to GasBuddy's data for 20 years.
Because of the agreement, GasBuddy, which uses crowdsourced
information to help people find deals on retail gasoline, has
been stopped from creating a service to compete with OPIS, the
department said.
"The divestitures will preserve competition for PRA (price
reporting agency) services, which are vital to the proper
functioning of commodity markets and promote transparency in the
financial markets," Richard Powers, acting head of the Justice
Department’s Antitrust Division, said in a statement.
The deal won EU antitrust approval in October, with some of the
same conditions.
(Reporting by Diane Bartz; editing by Diane Craft, Chris Reese
and Jonathan Oatis)
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