Japan′s Nikkei picks up stake in NewsRise

Japanese media company Nikkei Inc, which owns The Financial Times Ltd, has bought a 25.99 per cent stake in Indian financial news firm NewsRise Financial Research and Information Services. The Tokyo-headquartered firm said in a statement the investment is part of Nikkei′s strategic initiatives to expand in Asia. It did not disclose the value of the deal. Nikkei and NewsRise have been jointly providing English-language news pertaining to Southeast Asian stock markets since April 2017. The latest transaction will step up cooperation to deliver news about the region, it added. NewsRise was founded by former Dow Jones Newswires employees Abhijit Basu and Sumeet Nihalani in 2013. The company has bureaus in Mumbai, New Delhi, Kolkata and Bengaluru. Nikkei's investment in NewsRise comes two months after it acquired DealStreetAsia, a Singapore-based financial news and intelligence platform. In May, the Japanese media company had formed a content partnership with Chinese technology news portal 36Kr. Nikkei had made waves when it trumped Germany's Axel Springer to acquire The Financial Times from Britain's Pearson for $1.3 billion in 2015. Founded in 1876, Nikki has 37 foreign editorial bureaus and a team of around 1,500 journalists worldwide.