Short Takes: S&P Buys a Japanese Fund Data Company

Standard & Poor's said Thursday that it has bought a Tokyo-based provider of information and analysis on the Japanese mutual fund industry.

IFIS Inc. supplies daily net asset value and dividend data on 1,800 Japanese open-ended funds and 3,200 closed funds. The company also distributes daily Japanese fund prices, fund prospectuses, and annual reports. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Standard & Poor's has been trying to build its mutual fund information and analysis business in recent years. In 1997, for example, it bought Fund Research and Micropal.

The Japanese fund market had more than $300 billion of assets under management at the end of 1998, according to Standard & Poor's, a division of McGraw-Hill Cos.

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