Founded in January 1970, La Cote Bleue is an information vendor serving the financial press, monitoring investment-fund performances and producing television programs on financial themes. Revenues for 2001 will be in the vicinity of EUR 5 million.
This transaction will provide a basis for the development of significant synergies between Fininfo and La Cote Bleue:
- at operational level, where La Cote Bleue will be able to draw on the know-how of Fininfo in the collection and circulation of financial data
- in marketing terms, enabling La Cote Bleue and Fininfo to offer a complete range of services to the financial press - including market prices, specialized web services and workstations - as well as to management companies, with information covering net asset values and specifications of investment funds, related corporate actions and Europerformance rankings
- in terms of offerings, allowing La Cote Bleue to round out existing products and develop new products with value-added information generated by Fininfo.
The tie-up between Fininfo, Euronext NV and La Cote Bleue will also help to increase awareness of companies listed on Euronext NV markets, in particular through the development of a new framework for the circulation of pan-European price data.
Fininfo, specializing in financial -information services, employs a staff of 800. In 2000, it reported revenues of EUR 103.8 million and net income of EUR 13 million before amortization of goodwill on acquisitions.
Euronext, the first pan-European exchange, results from the merger in September 2000 of markets in Amsterdam, Brussels and Paris.
