Mumbai: It seems only apt that the chairman of Bloomberg Lp, the provider of financial data and news, is a former investment banker who is completely conversant with his company’s famous terminals. Credit Suisse veteran Peter Grauer joined Bloomberg in 2001. In an interview, he talks about his firm’s interest in local business channel UTV, emerging markets, and his company’s plans for its latest acquisition, BusinessWeek magazine. Edited excerpts:
Why did you decide to partner with UTV?
Up for competition: Grauer says Bloomberg will pick stake in UTV. Abhijit Bhatlekar / Mint
We did a lot of thinking about who the appropriate partner for Bloomberg would be before we decided on UTVi. A lot of our international feed will be on UTV, incorporated into audiovisual content. We’ve been impressed with the vision that UTV brings. They bring a lot of energy and experience to the table and they’ve marked out very clearly how they want to approach the market and we are very impressed with that.
We think that the Bloomberg name with a partnership (with UTV) on air will help promote the Bloomberg brand and allow us to sell our other products more effectively. We expect some rub off effect on that. We also think that the fundamentals of our agreement (with UTV); things that we have not publicized—nor will I talk about them—are such that if we are successful, there will be a lot of economic returns involved with that part of the business (TV) for us. For us, it’s initially further building our brand and creating value for Bloomberg’s overall business in India. India’s one of the most important emerging markets in the world. We have, for the first time in our 28-year history, built a five-year plan for India.
Are you picking a stake in Bloomberg-UTV? Do you see room for four-five business channels in India?
Yes, we will pick stake in UTV, though we don’t want to talk about it just yet. That’s a part of the arrangement. We like competition. In the US also, we have enough news channels competing with us such as CNBC, Fox, etc. I have been in the information business for 15 years and when I joined the business, there were 10 players. Now there are arguably only two.
There would be some who say that you have not been successful in the TV broadcast business...
Depends on how you look at it. We’ve always looked at broadcast as a great brand-building tool around the world. It got us known out there when people did not know who Bloomberg was and what a Bloomberg terminal is. We made a strategic change early this year when we decided to focus on English language content (on Bloomberg TV) as opposed to local language content. For us, although I would always like every one of our businesses to do better; our TV operation and multimedia business have helped in promoting and building the Bloomberg brand and creating a better awareness and giving us access to many more corporate and government officials.