Two years after it put the business it bought in 1984 on the market, Dun & Bradstreet Corp has finally found a buyer for its London-based Datastream International Ltd unit in the shape of McLean, Virginia-based Primark Corp, a diversified services company that wants to turn itself into a pure information services play. Primark will pay about $191m in cash and notes for the financial and share statistics information gatherer, which was originally created by London broker Hoare Govett. Datastream, with turnover of $94.6m for the fiscal year to November 30 last, is said to have excellent margins. The deal calls for Primark to pay Dun & Bradstreet $145m in cash and basis, about $35m in Primark convertible zero-coupon notes and $11m in zero-coupon notes of a single purpose Primark unit that will indirectly own the stock of Datastream. Primark said it had obtained a commitment letter from Mellon Bank NA and Barclays Bank Plc to provide up to $80m in financing and received $45m through a private placing of 8.82% notes issued by Primark Storage Leasing Corp. The convertible zero-coupon notes will mature in 10 years with a yield to maturity of 7%, while the single-purpose Primark unit will have a yield to maturity of 8.55% and mature in seven years. Datastream employs some 640 people in the 13 offices it runs worldwide. Dun & Bradstreet, which has now decided to keep Interactive Data, the other unit it put on the block with Datastream, made a modest return on the deal – it paid $102m for Datastream back in 1984.
