London Stock Exchange Group (LON:LSEG), which operates the largest stock bourse in the UK, has announced a new 10-year partnership with Microsoft, the US-based technology giant. According to the regulatory filing published Monday, Microsoft bought close to a 4% stake in the London exchange operator.
The decade-long cooperation should provide "next-generation data and analytics and cloud infrastructure solutions" with Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Azure and Microsoft AI. Under the agreement, the processes carried out by LSEG and its employees will be transferred to the environment offered by Microsoft, including Teams messenger and Microsoft 365 tools.
In addition, Microsoft will acquire nearly 4% of LSEG's stake, which Blackstone and Thomson Reuters Consortium previously held. Microsoft's former Executive Vice President, Scott Guthrie, will be appointed Non-Executive Director of LSEG.
LSEG believes the latest partnership will "increase LSEG's revenue growth meaningfully over time as new products come on stream." The total costs associated with the changes were estimated at £250-300 million (for 2023-2025).
"This strategic partnership is a significant milestone on LSEG's journey towards becoming the leading global financial markets infrastructure and data business, and will transform the experience for our customers," David Schwimmer, the Chief Executive Officer at LSEG, commented.
LSEG's offering will be built using the Microsoft Cloud service. LSEG says this will strengthen its position as a "world-leading" provider of data and infrastructure for financial markets.
LSEG and Microsoft Shares Up after the Announcement
Shares of the London Stock Exchange operator have been losing heavily since early December, testing on Friday which was the lowest levels since October 2022. However, the Microsoft partnership news prompted a bullish opening on Monday and brought a several percent upward gap. LSEG shares currently cost £7,658.
On the other hand, Microsoft's stocks have been consolidating for more than a month. On Friday, they closed at a slight loss of 0.8 percent at $245.42. The latest report resulted in a 0.44 percent increase to $246.51 in the pre-market trading hours.
In 2019, LSEG purchased the financial information company Refinitiv. The deal was valued at $27 billion.