Japanese media company Uzabase to buy business news website Quartz from Atlantic Media

Japanese media company Uzabase Inc on Monday said it is has agreed to buy business news website Quartz from US peer Atlantic Media in a deal valued at between $75 million to $110 million. The value of the deal will depend on Quartz meeting financial targets, Uzabase said in a statement. The deal is expected to close in the next 30 days, according to Quartz. Quartz’s founder and editor-in-chief Kevin J Delaney and publisher Jay Lauf will become co-CEOs of the website after the acquisition. “He [Yusuke Umeda, one of Uzabase’s founders] and his colleagues want to retain the Quartz name and our editorial team as the foundation in building what he called, with me, the leading global business news brand in the world, ” David G Bradley, the owner of Atlantic Media was quoted as saying by Quartz. On Monday, in a letter to readers, Delaney and Lauf said that Uzabase is the “perfect partner” for them to create a truly global business media company “spanning from Tokyo to New York”. “There is a striking overlap in the official values of Uzabase and Quartz, which include the importance of boldness and creativity, genuinely putting users first, being globally minded, and doing everything with a spirit of generosity,” the letter said. [caption id=“attachment_1989507” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] Representational image. Thinkstock[/caption] The purchase will accelerate an overseas push by Uzabase, owner of popular Japanese news aggregator NewsPicks, which selects the day’s top stories and allows comments from users that include well-known chief executives, reported Reuters. NewsPicks launched a US version of its website last year as a joint venture with Dow Jones, a subsidiary of News Corp. NewsPicks’ English-language business will in future be run by Quartz, Uzabase said. Quartz has grown rapidly since its founding in 2012 by tapping into an international and mobile-savvy audience with bite-size business stories. Over 20 million people access Quartz each month, with half its audience outside the US. The overseas expansion is the latest by a Japanese media company. In 2015, Japanese media group Nikkei bought Britain’s Financial Times (FT) from Pearson for $1.3 billion. The deal, struck after Nikkei beat Germany’s Axel Springer to the prize, marked the biggest acquisition by a Japanese media organisation and was seen as a coup for the employee-owned firm that lends its name to the main Japanese stock market index. In FT, it acquired an authoritative global newspaper that commands strong loyalty from its readers and has coped better than others with the shift to online publishing. With inputs from Reuters