Bloomberg L.P.

The company has established a unique position within the financial services industry by providing a broad range of functions combined into a single "package" that represents substantial value, while at the same time addressing the demand for investment performance and efficiency in increasingly complex global markets and exchanges. Through an unparalleled combination of information and analytics, Bloomberg Financial Markets has quickly built a worldwide customer base of issuers, financial intermediaries, and institutional investors. Bloomberg's core business is the Bloomberg, the world's fastest growing real-time financial information network, which links together the world's leading financial professionals. Bloomberg L.P. is a diversified information and media company, the core business of which is the leasing of a multifunction computer terminal to primarily financial and information industry customers such as banks, securities brokerage firms, government agencies, and media organizations. More than 75,000 such dual-screen terminals, known as "The Bloomberg," were used by more than 140,000 organizations in more than 90 countries in 1997, including the White House, the Vatican, the Bank of England, the Federal Reserve, the Sultan of Brunei, and the World Bank. Available in a standalone, a portable, and an "open," or PC-connectible version, the Bloomberg provides multimedia news, electronic communications, specialized financial computation services, and financial pricing and other data for all the major global securities markets including equities, money markets, currencies, municipals, corporate/Euro/sovereign bonds, commodities, mortgage-backed securities, derivative products (such as futures), and government securities. Besides its core data terminal business, Bloomberg's diversified media products include Bloomberg News (a news agency/wire service), Bloomberg and Bloomberg Personal magazines, Bloomberg Business Radio, Bloomberg Direct TV, Bloomberg Small Business TV, and Bloomberg Personal Online (an Internet site). Its oldest media venture is Bloomberg News, a global network of some 500 journalists who produce 3,000 business stories a day in five languages from more than 50 news bureaus worldwide. Bloomberg L.P. also maintains a large in-house staff of data collectors (Bloomberg Princeton, New Jersey), sales people, and computer programmers and technical personnel. Forbes magazine ranked Bloomberg L.P. 223rd in the 1996 Forbes 400 (by sales), and media mogul Rupert Murdoch has described Bloomberg's founder, Michael Bloomberg, as "the most creative media entrepreneur of our time and, with Bill Gates, perhaps the most successful." Using part of his Salomon windfall, Bloomberg assembled a group of computer programmers and in 1982 formed Innovative Marketing Systems (IMS). The only Wall Street firm interested in his idea, however, was Merrill Lynch, which agreed to buy Bloomberg's as yet incomplete machines if he could deliver them as advertised in six months. In June 1983, Bloomberg and his three core partners, Duncan MacMillan, Chuck Zegar, and Tom Secunda, demonstrated their prototype machine for Merrill Lynch, which had specified that the device perform complicated calculations on government bonds as well as conventional pricing computations of Merrill Lynch's inventory. Merrill Lynch was sufficiently impressed with Bloomberg's creation to order 20 of his machines (they would eventually order 1,000), but with one catch: Bloomberg would agree not to market the technology to Merrill Lynch's competitors for five years. To help finance Bloomberg's development of the computer, Merrill Lynch bought a 30 percent stake in IMS for $30 million. With its start-up cost worries eased, Bloomberg and his colleagues worked to expand the machine's capabilities with the help of Merrill Lynch traders. Freed from Merrill Lynch's apron strings, Bloomberg and his IMS partners set out to market their terminal to the larger financial world.