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(Reuters) News
Corp's Dow Jones & Co Inc. is only in the early stages of exploring a sale
of its stock market index business and a sales prospectus has not gone out yet,
a source familiar with the matter said.
Goldman Sachs
has been hired as a financial advisor to explore the options for the business,
which includes the Dow Jones industrial average, according the source, who
declined to identified because the process is private.
A Dow Jones
spokesman could not be reached immediately for comment.
Rupert
Murdoch's News Corp bought Dow Jones in 2007 for $5.7 billion, but since then
he has come under criticism for paying such a hefty price for a publishing
company whose businesses have suffered from the sharp drop in ad sales. Earlier
this year, News Corp wrote down $2.8 billion in Dow Jones' value.
The move to
explore options for the business is not surprising. Industry analysts never
felt it was much favored by Murdoch, a passionate backer of newspapers and one
of the best-known media moguls.
Indeed, a
number of analysts expected him to consider a sale of the index business soon
after striking the deal for Dow Jones.
Potential
buyers for the business could include McGraw-Hill’s Standard & Poor's,
Russell Indexes, MSCI Inc, Bloomberg, Pearson Plc's Financial Times and Thomson
Reuters Corp. On Friday, all of those companies declined to comment.
The Wall Street
Journal, which first reported the news, said the process could result in an
arrangement other than a sale, like a joint venture.
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