August 25, 2011 8:05 pm

Bloomberg makes agreed $990m bid for BNA

By Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson in London

Bloomberg is planning the largest deal in the private company’s 30-year history, with a $990m agreed bid for BNA, an employee-owned legal, tax and regulatory information company founded in 1929 as the Bureau of National Affairs.

The financial data group is paying a steep three times BNA’s $331m revenue for 2010, after a sale process that drew interest from other potential bidders, including Thomson Reuters and Reed Elsevier.

The acquisition would add significant heft to Bloomberg’s efforts to crack the legal and regulatory information markets with Bloomberg Law, where it needs more content to compete with Thomson Reuters’ Westlaw and Reed Elsevier’s Lexis Nexis.

BNA, which has a seat in the White House press briefing room, would also boost Bloomberg Government, a data-heavy service for Washington lobbyists and lawmakers. The acquisition of the largest independent publisher in the industry depends on regulatory clearance from the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission.

BNA has long been unionised, boasting on its website that collective bargaining agreements negotiated by the Washington-Baltimore Newspaper Guild “have given BNA workers a suite of benefits rarely to be found in a company of its sizeâ€