Microsoft to buy 4% of London Stock Exchange in 10-year platform deal
- Reference: 1670848213
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2022/12/12/london_stock_exchange_ms/
- Source link:
The agreement will see the American software behemoth buy 4 percent equity of LSEG itself from the Blackstone/Thomson Reuters Consortium as well as sorting the bourse's tech migration in the name of "a digital transformation approach underpinned by modern cloud and AI technology."
Microsoft will refurb "legacy platforms," let loose "siloed information" and unplug "limits on scale and data overload," or so it said in a [1]statement this morning.
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LSEG [3]said the deal would increase the exchange's revenue growth "meaningfully over time as new products come on-stream," without putting a number on that. Microsoft, on the other hand, had that dollar value ready for the next earnings call and said it "estimates this partnership, and broader market opportunity, could generate an additional $5 billion in revenue for the company over the next 10 years, including the $2.8 billion minimum spend commitments from LSEG for cloud services and support."
Welcome to Excel
"The initial focus will be on delivering interoperability between LSEG Workspace and Microsoft Teams, Excel and PowerPoint with other Microsoft applications and a new version of LSEG's Workspace," Redmond said, confirming that Excel integration would be a part of this, and that City workers on LSEG's Workspace would henceforth be collaborating using Microsoft Teams.
"Customers will be able to create financial models, run data analytics and visualizations using LSEG content delivered in Excel and work seamlessly between LSEG Workspace and Microsoft 365."
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The LSE said total incremental cash costs over 2023-2025 for the group were expected to be in the range of "£250-300 million, including around £100 million in capex and a 50-100 basis points impact on EBITDA margin over the same period."
In its own statement, LSEG also confirmed the contractual commitment for minimum cloud-related spend with Microsoft of $2.8 billion (£2.3 billion) over the term of the partnership, saying "additional spend with Microsoft will be driven by the success of the strategic partnership."
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David Schwimmer – [7]CEO of LSEG , not the Friends actor – said of the deal: "This strategic partnership is a significant milestone on LSEG's journey towards becoming the leading global financial markets infrastructure and data business, and will transform the experience for our customers."
[8]London Stock Exchange CEO still aiming for dual Arm listing
[9]UK govt refuses to give up on scoring Arm dual-listing for London
[10]Two massive US datacenter real estate investment trusts taken over in $10bn, $15bn deals
[11]Microsoft makes another round of jobs cuts amid slowing economy
[12]GCHQ: A cyber-what-now? Rumours of our probe into London Stock Exchange 'cyberattack' have been greatly exaggerated
The bourse also confirmed that co-inventor of ASP.NET Scott Guthrie, an exec veep in Microsoft's Cloud and AI Group, will soon be a non-executive director of LSEG, subject to the "appropriate approvals."
Last month, Guthrie [13]said the challenging economy wasn't hitting the software giant on all fronts: "I've not seen the current situation cause people to pause cloud spending," the cloud exec [14]told CNBC .
Microsoft recently made [15]round of job cuts – thought to be under 1,000 – to keep costs down as the biggest technology companies shore up resources to mitigate impending global economic pain.
Analysts at TMV noted that in 2021, LSEG spent $27 billion to acquire market data purveyor Refinitiv, which provides analytics and financial data to more than 40,000 clients globally.
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It added: "In May 2022, they also acquired US financial markets data specialist MayStreet which combines ultra-low latency software with cloud technology, to provide real-time access to comprehensive global market data... The LSEG has been looking to differentiate itself in the market with an end-to-end proposition across trading, execution, data and analytics solutions." ®
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[1] https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2022/12/11/empowering-the-future-of-financial-markets-with-london-stock-exchange-group/
[2] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offprem/paasiaas&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2Y5deNMf7eY9qQSf0EZA2vQAAAIM&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[3] https://www.lseg.com/en/media-centre/press-releases/2022/lseg-and-microsoft-launch-strategic-partnership
[4] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offprem/paasiaas&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44Y5deNMf7eY9qQSf0EZA2vQAAAIM&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[5] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offprem/paasiaas&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33Y5deNMf7eY9qQSf0EZA2vQAAAIM&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[6] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offprem/paasiaas&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44Y5deNMf7eY9qQSf0EZA2vQAAAIM&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[7] https://www.lseg.com/en/about-us/executive-team
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2022/07/22/lse_ceo_arm_ipo/
[9] https://www.theregister.com/2022/09/16/uk_government_refuses_to_give/
[10] https://www.theregister.com/2021/11/16/cyrusone_coresite/
[11] https://www.theregister.com/2022/10/18/microsoft_makes_another_round_of/
[12] https://www.theregister.com/2020/01/06/gchq_london_stock_exchange_cyberattack_allegation/
[13] https://www.theregister.com/2022/10/18/microsoft_makes_another_round_of/
[14] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/10/12/microsoft-cloud-boss-scott-guthrie-customers-not-cutting-spending.html
[15] https://www.theregister.com/2022/10/18/microsoft_makes_another_round_of/
[16] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offprem/paasiaas&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33Y5deNMf7eY9qQSf0EZA2vQAAAIM&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[17] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
... and introduce a brand[ed] new financial term "Market Reboot(tm)"...
Looking on the bright side it should make it much easier for American spies to trawl through the data :-)
Looks like Microsoft lassoed a dumbass cash cow
Well we now know the cause of the next recession driven by bankers.
Re: Looks like Microsoft lassoed a dumbass cash cow
The relaxation of banking rules yet again? Just like all the other crashes.
You can't get fired for buying...
... Microsoft? Really, Microsoft??
Well, it seems so.
The number of companies I've seen using Office 365 / Dyanmics / Teams since the (first) lockdown is insane. I even had a call with a hosting vendor we use which largely offers Linux based servers only to find the call was on Teams and pretty much the entire company - aside from the infrastructure they sold - was running on MS tech! Bonkers.
Personally the last time I used any MS tech in my day-to-day work was around 8 years ago. I haven't kept up but it seems to me like they're eating up a big chunk of the market. Market for what though? We know the world runs on Excel, has done for the last 20+ years, and I can't see that going away any time soon. Maybe that's the reason: because they are The Excel People (TM) as far as those who make decisions on what tech to use goes.
After that conversation with my hosting provider the one thing that stuck out was... it doesn't really matter what the use-case or business need is... somebody can fill it with a Microsoft "solution" even if it involves a clusterfuck of import/export Excel file routines to make things "work". Throw in a few Power BI charts and the board-level folks will be kept happy.
It blows my mind that even though it's nearly 2023 everything still lives in Excel and so much other software is just a means to import from, or export to it. Creating multiple sources of truth and a shit ton of problems.
Re: You can't get fired for buying...
Because, unfortunately, Excel is quite powerful. Take Google Shits, I mean Sheets for example, its really shit compared to Excel.
Re: You can't get fired for buying...
I'm only tangentially an MS user bit this is just silly. Teams used to be dogshit but honestly these days it's genuinely pretty good. It does a bunch of the ancillary enterprise-y bits in a much nicer way for security-conscious customers than Zoom or Google Meet does. The big example being that it's possible to enforce your org's policies on your staff joining a call hosted by someone else. This means it's possible for me to host calls with my public sector customers with either one of us hosting and the same rules applied either way - no chat, no files, no remote control and so on - without me having to put in place some special snowflake customer-specific policy, and without one of us faffing about making sure it's always hosted from the "right end". It also does some other bits right like modeling file transfer as an upload to OneDrive and archiving meeting chats persistently alongside emails for super easy compliance/retention.
Sure, it's not as slick or high-quality as zoom, but the idea that all MS tech is evil and anyone using it is stupid is these days just plain dumb. If you've not used any of it in nearly a decade you shouldn't be surprised to find out your recollection of the products isn't the same as reality. Office even has collaboration and versioning now!
The main thing to be worried about as an MS user these days isn't quality or capability, it's just pure reliability. Azure's reliability record this year is miles and miles behind AWS's and Google's. Multiple major outages. That's going to be a very big deal for LSEG.
Well, Well.
Something else being sold off. I wonder who will really pocket the proceeds this time.
Re: Well, Well.
MS will. They bought it. That's kind of the point.
If MS own a chunk of the Exchange, will it now be called SharePoint?
Well, that'll bring a new meaning to stock market crash......