After losing the battle this week to buy the Chicago Board of Trade, the Atlanta-based IntercontinentalExchange is open to purchasing another exchange or becoming a take-over target itself, the head of ICE said on Thursday.
"I'm really open to shareholder value issues. So, together (with another exchange) if we could create more value, then a partner would be great," ICE Chairman Jeffrey Sprecher told Reuters in an interview during a break at a congressional hearing on trading in energy derivatives.
Sprecher declined to say which exchange ICE might be interested in buying or have purchase ICE. "I don't want to talk about a specific (exchange) other than to say you can see I've been a big builder of value, starting a company (ICE) with my own money that today is worth $11 billion," he said.
"Whether they come up into us or we go up into them. ... You're in a consolidating industry," Sprecher said. "If the whole concept of two (exchanges) together are better than apart then, you know, market forces should push them together." The Chicago Mercantile Exchange outbid ICE to purchase the Chicago Board of Trade.