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overview
holdings
landmarks
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overview
This
profile considers Dun & Bradstreet, aka D&B.
It covers -
introduction
New York-based D&B is a specialist information service
provider that during the second half of last century encompassed
US printing, audience research and broadcasting interests.
As of 2002 its revenue was around US$1.4 billion, with
approximately 9,000 employees worldwide. In 2001 it spun
off the Moodys financial data service.
Its corporate site is here.
holdings
An indication of D&B holdings is here.
history
D&B dates from 1841, with the establishment by Lewis
Tappan (1788-1873) of a commercial credit service, the
Mercantile Agency.
Tappan was founder of the Journal of Commerce
and author of Is it Right to be Rich? He was a
prominent Abolitionist, co-founding the American Anti-Slavery
Society in 1833 (and splitting it in 1840 - when a woman
was elected to the Society's board - declaring that it
would be "promiscuous for a lady to sit behind closed
doors with gentlemen"). In 1839 he had been prominent
in the Amistad
case. He went on to write The Fugitive Slave Bill:
Its History & Unconstitutionality, With An Acount
of The Seizure & Enslavement of James Hamlet, &
His Subsequent Restoration to Liberty and sponsor
The Emancipator newspaper.
The rough and ready nature of reporting was demonstrated
in the landmark defamation action by John Beardsley, commenced
in 1848 and lasting for 23 years, that privileged reporting
agencies and in the words of critic Scott Sandage saw
the US
sacrifice
privacy rights in the quest to separate good credit
from bad, the virtuous from the failed, the saved from
the damned.
RG Dun was incorporated by his grandson in 1859: employees
included Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S Grant, Grover Cleveland
and William McKinley. Its subscribers grew from 7,000
in the 1870s to 40,000 in the 1880s. By 1900 its reports
covered over a million US businesses. In 1933 Dun merged
with The Bradstreet Companies (a competitor founded in
1849).
John Moody (1868-1958) established what became Moody's
Investors Service - acquired by Dun & Bradstreet in
1962 and spun off in 2000 - when he published Moody's
Manual of Industrial & Corporation Securities.
There is an account of the company in his autobiography
The Long Road Home (1933) and Fast by the Road
(1942).
Moody's status is reflected in Thomas Friedman's 1996
comment that
there
are two superpowers in the world today in my opinion.
There's the United States and there's Moody's Bond Rating
Service. The United States can destroy you by dropping
bombs, and Moody's can destroy you by downgrading your
bonds. And believe me, it's not clear sometimes who's
more powerful.
Dun
& Bradstreet, like its competitors, acquired and shed
a range of general and specialist media interests during
the 1980s and 1990s.
It sold its television stations in 1984 and bought the
ACNielsen audience measurement group (profiled here),
founded in 1923. Nielsen was spun off in 1996.
Intercontinental Medical Statistics (IMS) was bought in
1988 and spun off as Cognizant (subsequently disassembled)
in 1996. The Official Airlines Guide was sold to Maxwell
in 1988 for US$750 million.
Directory printer RH Donnelley, acquired in 1961, was
spun off in 1998.
Cognizant Technology Solutions was established as the
group's inhouse technology development centre in 1994
and spun off as a software development and maintenance
services business as part of Cognizant.
In 2001 Dun & Bradstreet rebadged itself as D&B.
In 2002 it paid US$117 million for the Hoovers information
service.
studies
There has been no major independent study of Dun &
Bradstreet, regrettable given its significance for the
rise of the modern corporation and what has been characterised
as the information economy.
For Tappan see in particular Bertram Wyatt-Brown's Lewis
Tappan and the Evangelical War Against Slavery (Baton
Rouge: Louisianna State Uni Press 1997), A Side-Light
on Anglo-American Relations 1839-58, Furnished by the
Correspondence of Lewis Tappan and Others with The British
and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society (rpr New York: AM
Kelley 1970) edited by Annie Abel and Born Losers:
A History of Failure in America (Cambridge: Harvard
Uni Press 2005) by Scott Sandage. Dun is covered in James
Norris' R G Dun & Co, 1841-1900: The Development of
Credit Reporting in the Nineteenth Century (Westport:
Greenwood Press 1978).
A perspective on the early days is provided by Alfred
Chandler's
exemplary Henry Varnum Poor, Business Editor, Analyst
& Reformer (Cambridge: Harvard Uni Press 1956)
and Richard Sylla's crisp 2001 A Historical Primer
on the Business of Credit Ratings (PDF).
For more recent times see papers in Credit Reporting
Systems & the International Economy (Cambridge:
MIT Press 2003) edited by Margaret Miller, Ratings,
Rating Agencies and the Global Financial System (London:
Kluwer Academic 2002) by Richard Levich, Giovanni Majnoni,
Carmen Reinhart & Giocanni Majnoni and The Growth
of Credit Information: A History of UAPT-Infolink plc.
(Oxford: Blackwell 1992) by C. McNeil Greig.
next page (D&B
holdings)
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