McGraw-Hill, Thomson units merge to form separate entity

Washington, May 7: TWO economic-consulting companies, called DRI and WEFA, will be carved out of their parent organisations and merged in a transaction that is expected to be completed soon.

Combined, the two economic-consulting units, which will be called DRI-WEFA Inc, will have $70 million in revenue, according to Joseph Kasputys, a former senior executive of both companies who is engineering the acquisition and will be chairman and main shareholder in the parent of the new organization. DRI-WEFA will be owned by closely held Global Insight Inc., a Waltham, Mass, company formed by Mr Kasputys and a partner, Michael Kargula.Mr Kasputys didn’t disclose the value of the transaction.

DRI, formerly known as Data Resources Inc, is a unit of the McGraw-Hill Cos, a New York publisher and financial-services company with $4.3 billion in revenue. WEFA, formerly known as Wharton Econometric Forecasting Associates, is a unit of Thomson Corp, a Toronto diversified-information company with $6.5 billion in revenue. Both economic-consulting companies came of age during the 1960s and 1970s, when corporate-planning departments turned to the large mainframe computers of these consultants for advice on turns in the economy. WEFA was created in 1963 by Lawrence Klein, a Nobel laureate from the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.

-- The Wall Street Journal