Thomson Reuters' Brain

Buying Reuters has also meant that “we have a more global view now,” Jackson says. The R&D group is working on “the internationalization of artificial intelligence technology.”

In short, Reuters has added exponentially to the ways the merged company can layer together its content, media, technologies, geographies—and more acquisitions—to create new opportunities for itself.

Thomson Sells Reuters and Vice Versa

Warwick stands in the main lobby at Thomson Reuters Legal headquarters in Eagan and glances at the time—in Buenos Aires, New York, San Francisco, Tokyo, Beijing, Bangalore, London. In April 2008, after a nearly year-long acquisition process that included close antitrust scrutiny, Thomson Corporation closed on its $17 billion purchase of Reuters Group. In an instant, Thomson, largely a North American company, had substantial assets overseas. The mindset had to become “one where global is the norm,” Warwick says. So up went the clocks.

Thomson Corporation began in 1934 with Roy Thomson buying the Timmins (Ontario) Press and later, more newspapers, broadcasters, and book and magazine publishers in Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom. But in the ’80s, ’90s, and ’00s, it was selling off many of those interests in favor of buying collections of data and technologies for delivering them in the health care, education, financial, scientific, and legal fields. West Publishing was one of those purchases—already a major player in online legal search, but lacking resources to overtake competitor LexisNexis. Thomson brought deep pockets, but was also criticized for spending $3.4 billion on West. The price was four times West’s annual revenues, reported to be around $825 million.

Wall Street’s boo birds came out again when Thomson agreed to pay a 43 percent premium for Reuters. But Thomson, with products including First Call and Thomson One, had been a distant third behind Bloomberg and Reuters in the financial-information market. Buying Reuters took it up to 34 percent market share, just edging Bloomberg out of the top spot.

More important: In many respects, Thomson and Reuters were not direct competitors, so the merger was an opportunity to use Reuters businesses to sell Thomson products and the reverse.

The Reuters news brand will help with that. The news service provides less than 3 percent of Thomson Reuters’ revenues, but that understates the power of the brand. Founded in 1851, Reuters used carrier pigeons and early telegraph cables to relay news and stock prices around Europe. Now, it has 2,700 journalists across the globe.