Citicorp sells information subsidiary in drive to divest peripheral lines.

Continuing to divest businesses that are not central to its strategy, Citicorp has sold IBES Inc., a subsidiary that provides corporate earnings estimates, for an undisclosed sum.

Late Monday, the banking company announced the sale of IBES to Disclosure, a Baltimore, Md., unit of the Dutch publishing conglomerate VNU.

Quitting Information Services

Citicorp, which once had hoped to be a major information services vendor, said it now has sold all but one of its information services businesses.

"We've stepped away from the idea of being big information industry players, and we've been methodically divesting all those businesses," said Laura Williamson, Citicorp vice president and head of corporate finance.

Citicorp's biggest information services business was Quotron, the troubled stock-quote business that was sold this year to Reuters Holdings of London.

Global Report, a supplier of economic information, is the last such company the company plans to sell, Ms. Williamson said. Citicorp said the sale of IBES would have no material effect on earnings.

IBES collects corporate earnings forecasts from about 6,000 research analysts at 600 brokerage firms and tracks about 14,000 publicly traded companies. The service has about 1,000 subscribers.

105 Employees Affected

IBES competes with earnings estimates firms such as First Call, a unit of Thomson Financial Services. Its name is short for Institutional Brokers' Estimate System.

The unit has 105 employees, most of them based in New York. IBES also has a marketing office in London.

Disclosure sells financial information such as 10K and 10Q reports.

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