Signing a cheque for $1,500m must be a little daunting even if you sit atop Reed Elsevier Plc, but the Anglo-Dutch publishing house is taking a short cut onto the InfoBahn by agreeing to pay $1,500m cash for Mead Corp’s Nexis and Lexis database operations and related Mead Data Central electronic information assets. Lexis is an on-line distributor of primary legal source material and Nexis is a news, business and financial information database with full text and data from more than 4,500 publications. The acquisition also includes Michie Co, a leading state law publisher. The unit had operating profit of $68m on sales of $551m last year. Read will have to borrow $1,000m but Reed told Reuter it was still interested in buying Ziff Davies.
