S&P Global (SPGI)

Key Statistics

EV/EBIT = 22.72x

ROE = 17.89%

Debt/Equity = 40%

FCF Yield = 2.04%

Dividend Yield = 1.02%

Market Capitalization = $112.97 billion

The Company

S&P (Standard & Poors) Global, Inc. (SPGI) is a financial data company headquartered in New York. It is a result of many mergers & acquisitions over the last century. For most of the previous century, the company was called McGraw Hill.

McGraw Hill traces its origins back to 1888. It began with a single publication: the American Journal of Railway Appliances. Throughout the early 20th century, McGraw Hill acquired more publication brands and brought them into the McGraw Hill publishing family. A key focus for McGraw-Hill was an educational publishing business. If you’ve been through the American educational system, you used many McGraw-Hill products.

The company engaged in numerous acquisitions of publications & brands throughout the 20th century.

The most significant acquisition was in the world of finance: the 1966 acquisition of Standard & Poor's. Standard & Poor's publishes the S&P 500 index and issues credit ratings. Standard & Poor's origins trace back to the 1800s when the company sold financial information about railroads.

A shakeup of the McGraw-Hill company occurred in the early 2010s to specifically focus on the lucrative financial data business. The goal was to carve out the less profitable segments of the firm to focus more on the core competency of the financial data business.