Bloomberg buys UK energy data group

Bloomberg, the privately owned financial data company that had made only one acquisition in 28 years before buying Business Week, has bought New Energy Finance in a bet on the growth of carbon markets and clean energy investment.

New Energy Finance, a company founded in London in 2004, employs 130 people and provides news, data and analysis on clean energy topics from renewables to carbon capture.

Dan Doctoroff, Bloomberg’s president, likened New Energy Finance’s attempts to become the information source for these rapidly expanding markets to Bloomberg’s beginnings in 1981, when it set out to make bond markets more transparent.

“When you have better information and transparency you enhance the capital markets themselves and the flow of capital,” he told the Financial Times.

The acquisition, completed on Wednesday for an undisclosed price, comes a week after Bloomberg closed its purchase of Business Week, the US magazine formerly owned by McGraw-Hill.

“These are the exceptions. They are definitely not the rule,” Mr Doctoroff said. “We have a very, very strong bias here towards building it on our own.”

Bloomberg hopes New Energy Finance will give it a leading position in providing information about a rapidly growing asset class.

“We’re going to see explosive growth in these markets in the next few years,” said Mr Doctoroff.

New Energy Finance calculates that trading volume in global carbon markets will rise from about $120bn this year to about $2,000bn by 2020.

Michael Liebreich, the group’s chairman and chief executive, said Bloomberg’s analytical tools and technology skills would enable it to expand in step with its markets. “We have got the leading market position in our niche, but our niche isn’t going to be niche for very long,” he told the FT.

He estimated the market for news and analysis on clean energy was “well into the high hundreds of millions” of dollars, but much of this was going to generalist consultancies.