Michael Bloomberg is a marked man. Dow Jones, the 110-year-old publisher of business news, has threatened to "get" him. British media conglomerate Reuters recently launched a new product it informally dubbed the "Bloomberg Killer." Bloomberg also ranks No. 1 on the hit list of a powerful new joint venture formed by Salomon Brothers, Morgan Stanley, First Boston, Citibank, Lehman Brothers and Goldman Sachs.
At 5 ft. 10 in., balding and a little paunchy, Bloomberg, 50, is no Arnold Schwarzenegger. But to his competitors, he has seemed like the Wall Street version of the Terminator. With fewer resources and less experience than its bigger rivals, his upstart firm, Bloomberg Financial Markets, has managed to overpower the competition in one market after another. Relying on in-house technology and a shrewd low-cost pricing strategy, Bloomberg broke industry leader Telerate's monopoly on the market to supply prices of government bonds. He stunned global giant Reuters in its own backyard by stealing the Bank of England as a customer. His stock-quote service is beating the pants off Quotron, whose name had been virtually synonymous with electronic stock-price quotations. And though they are outnumbered 7 to 1, his business news-wire reporters are giving Dow Jones a run for its money. "Do we take Bloomberg seriously?" asks Carl Valenti, president and publisher of Dow Jones Information Services. "You're darn right!"
Bloomberg may be the new kid on the block, but he is the fastest-growing vendor in the $4 billion market for electronic financial information. His firm distributes quotes on stocks, bonds, currencies and other securities, plus up- to-the-minute business news, to 20,000 desktop terminals worldwide. Although his service ranks sixth in customers -- behind Reuters, Dow Jones (including its Telerate division), Automatic Data Processing, Quotron and Knight-Ridder -- Bloomberg is adding 625 new terminals each month. The firm is launching assaults on other markets as well. In July it started a monthly financial magazine, appropriately called Bloomberg. And last month it paid $14 million for New York City radio station WNEW-AM, which it plans to convert to an all-business news format. "The future belongs to multimedia, not one- product companies," says Bloomberg. "I'm going to make sure that we're one of those New Age companies."
Though it is 10 years old, Bloomberg Financial Markets still operates on a no-frills basis out of its Manhattan headquarters -- no secretaries, no job titles and no private offices. Bloomberg, a hands-on manager who insists on signing every invoice and nonpayroll check, relies heavily on hungry college recruits to staff his 850-person firm. He pays straight salary, no sales commission. But his real strength has been the Bloomberg, his own terminal- and-software system that looks more like a Nintendo game than a serious number cruncher. Unlike most computer systems, which largely supply users with rigid rows of numbers, the Bloomberg lets traders sort and manipulate incoming data. It calculates the future value of bonds, for instance, displays the price history of stocks, evaluates portfolios under various interest rates, and more. Whereas competitors generally charge $2,000 to $4,000 a month, Bloomberg sells his service for $995 a month.