Blackstone, Thomson Reuters Plan £2.3 Billion LSE Share Sale

Swetha Gopinath, Bloomberg News

The logo of London Stock Exchange Group Plc in the office atrium in the City of London, UK, on Tuesday, March 14, 2023. European stocks rose, snapping three days of losses, as US inflation cooled as expected last month and concern eased over wider market repercussions from Silicon Valley Bank's collapse. Photographer: Hollie Adams/Bloomberg , Bloomberg

(Bloomberg) -- A consortium of investors including Blackstone Inc. and Thomson Reuters Corp. raised about £2 billion ($2.5 billion) by offloading shares in London Stock Exchange Group Plc via an overnight placing.

The group, which also includes Canada Pension Plan Investment Board and Singaporean sovereign wealth fund GIC, sold 25.5 million shares at £79.50 apiece, according to a statement Thursday. The price represents a 3.8% discount to the exchange operator’s previous close.

The selling consortium is made up of the former owners of Refinitiv, a data services firm that LSEG acquired for $27 billion in 2021. The group has spent much of the year selling large chunks of shares in the exchange operator. In March, they announced the sale of about £2 billion of the shares and in May, they kicked off a process to sell about £2.7 billion.

The consortium also put call options in place over about 8.2 million shares, which would allow them to cut more LSEG stake down the line. An additional 2.7 million LSEG shares were placed in the latest offering as a hedge to the call options put in place by the sellers. Including this block, the share sale raised about £2.2 billion.

Separately, LSEG made an off-market purchase of 9.5 million shares worth about £750 million. The Blackstone consortium’s economic interest in LSEG has fallen to around 12% after the latest sales, down from about 19%, according to Bloomberg calculations. That number could drop to 11% if the call options are exercised.

The selldown comes at a time when the exchange is grappling with an exodus of companies, and a sharp decline in local listings due to the lure of deeper capital pools in the US and a persistent valuation discount for British stocks. The UK has responded by tweaking listing rules to make London a more attractive place for issuers seeking equity funding.

Barclays Plc, Bank of America Corp., Goldman Sachs Group Inc., JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Morgan Stanley arranged the share sale.

LSEG Chief Executive Officer David Schwimmer has previously said the company will look to “support an orderly selldown” for the consortium. After the Refinitiv deal, the exchange now makes most of its money from data services. The parent company of Bloomberg News competes with Refinitiv to provide financial news, data and information.

--With assistance from Thyagaraju Adinarayan.

(Updates with details of consortium’s stake, context on London market from fifth paragraph.)