Bloomberg, the financial media giant selling $24,000-a-year terminals, saw sales of its ubiquitous black-and-orange screens fall for the second time ever last year, according to a new industry report.
Terminal rentals declined by about 1 percent last year, to 324,485 worldwide, as banks downsized and cut the cord, according to a report released Tuesday by Burton-Taylor International Consulting.
The 2016 decline in terminal sales was only the second time in the company’s nearly 36-year history. The only other down year was 2009, during the financial crisis.
Last year, The Post exclusively reported that JPMorgan and Bank of America, two of the company’s biggest customers, were looking to cut as many as 7,000 terminals during the next three years as part of larger budget overhauls.
Bloomberg is still the biggest player in the field — with more than a third of the entire market share. The next-biggest company, Thomson Reuters, fell to 23 percent.
Despite the terminal drop-off, Bloomberg still managed to increase revenue by about 3.4 percent, to $9.2 billion — in part because of a 10 percent spike in bankers buying raw data feeds.
“Increasingly, people in finance want to get to the source of the data without anyone standing in between the news and them,” Morgan Downey, CEO at Money.Net and a Bloomberg competitor, told The Post.
It isn’t clear how profitable Bloomberg is, since the company reports revenues but not costs.
One reason for the decline in terminal sales has to do with the terminal contracts, almost all of which are denominated in US dollars, three sources in the company told The Post.
The US dollar has gained so much against others that in places like Brazil — where the value of its currency has collapsed against the greenback since 2012 — terminals have effectively doubled in price from only a few years ago.
Overall, the company’s growth has slowed around the world during the last four years. In Europe, the Middle East and Africa, terminal sales have dropped 1.8 percent during that time. They’re up 5.8 percent in Asia and 0.6 percent in the Americas.
“Even though it’s a reality that people in Brazil or other countries suffer those problems when paying for those Bloombergs, Bloomberg has been able to sell enough terminals around the world that the net isn’t crushing them,” Douglas B. Taylor, the author of the report, told The Post.
Ty Trippet, a spokesman for Bloomberg, declined to comment.