Thomson Reuters to Divest Health Business

Thomson Reuters announced their intention to divest their $450mm healthcare business yesterday. The business provides data, analytics and performance benchmarking solutions and services to companies, government agencies and healthcare professionals. From their press release:

With leading assets and solutions such as MarketScan, Advantage Suite, Micromedex, CareDiscovery and ActionOI, coupled with expert services and analysis, the Healthcare business provides its customers with solutions to identify savings, improve outcomes, fight fraud and abuse and more efficiently manage their healthcare operations.

The Healthcare business in 2010 had revenues of approximately $450 million and an operating margin comparable to the company’s consolidated margin of 19.3%. Following adjustment for this divestiture by removing Healthcare’s results from ongoing businesses, no material impact is expected to the company’s previously announced 2011 outlook. The company expects the divestiture to close before the end of the year.

This divestiture will result in a realignment of the company’s existing Intellectual Property and Science businesses into a single operating unit of the Professional division. Both are global and support scientific research, discovery and innovation. Details related to the realignment can be found in the “Investor Relations” section of the Thomson Reuters website. Thomson Reuters will provide restated historical financial information on its website, which reflects this realignment and which excludes results from the Healthcare business, early in July and its second quarter reported results will reflect these changes.

Potential acquirers are likely to include private equity backed companies but operating companies interested in the business will include IMS Health, Wolters Kluwer, Reed Elsevier and others. With an operating margin close to 20% and revenues of $450 mm the acquisition is likely to be expensive.