LONDON (Reuters) -An investor consortium including Blackstone (NYSE:BX) and Thomson Reuters, the parent company of Reuters News, is selling 1.7 billion pounds ($2.01 billion) worth of shares in the London Stock Exchange Group (LON:LSEG) to trim its joint stake.
Investment banks managing the sale of 23 million LSEG shares had orders for all the stock in the offering, according to bookrunner messages seen by Reuters after close of markets on Tuesday.
The transaction follows the publication of LSEG's 2022 earnings last week, which showed an increase in total income to 7.74 billion pounds from 6.54 billion pounds the year prior, beating analysts expectations.
Separately, the bourse operator plans to buy back up to 750 million pounds of stock from the Blackstone-Thomson Reuters consortium by April 2024.
U.S. technology giant Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) previously agreed to purchase a 4% stake from the consortium as part of a wider strategic partnership with LSEG in December.
Blackstone and Thomson Reuters have been shareholders in LSEG since they sold financial data provider Refinitiv to the UK group in 2021, in a landmark deal valued at $27 billion.
Following the latest stake sale, the consortium will not be able to offload any further shares for a 90-day period, according to a bank term sheet.
Barclays (LON:BARC), Citi, Goldman Sachs (NYSE:GS) and Morgan Stanley (NYSE:MS) are joint global coordinators on the transaction, with Blackstone's own capital markets unit acting as co-lead manager.
($1 = 0.8437 pounds)