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overview
holdings
landmarks
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overview
This
profile considers the Thomson Reuters group, created through
Thomson's takeover of Reuters.
It covers -
introduction
The
multinational Thomson group in mid February 2000 announced
that it was essentially abandoning print in favour of
electronic publishing. (In practice it remains a dominant
publisher of legal and other books.)
In mid-July 2000 it disposed of its remaining travel businesses
for several billion dollars and subsequently transferred
the Globe & Mail to a joint venture with Bell
Canada Enterprises (BCE), the television,
telephone and multimedia conglomerate.
The group formerly owned a string of Canadian
newspapers and was a rival of Conrad Black's
Hollinger chain (now largely dismembered through sale
of its Canadian properties to CanWest
and acquisition of the UK titles by the Barclay
brothers).
In December 2005 BCE sold most of its stake in Bell Globemedia,
for C$1.3 billion, reducing its holding to 20% from 68.5
percent. Torstar and the Ontario
Teachers' Pension Plan agreed to take 20% stakes, paying
C$283 million. Woodbridge, the Thomson family holding
company, was to increase its stake in Bell Globemedia
to 40% from 31.5%, paying C$120 million.
In May 2007 Reuters and Thomson
agreed on terms for a merger to create Thomson Reuters
PLC, which would be one of the world's three largest financial
information providers. The deal values Reuters at US$17.2
billion, with Thomson shareholders controlling around
70% of stock in the new group. Thomson had earlier acquired
the AFX business news service from Paris-based news agency
Agence France-Presse and announced sale of the higher
education, careers and library reference assets of Thomson
Learning and Nelson Thornes to Apax and Omers Capital
Partners for US$7.75 billion.
the company
Based
in Toronto, the group is still predominantly owned by
the Thomson family, worth upwards of US$16 billion. Roy
Thomson - once described as "an animated cash register"
- bought a Canadian radio station in the thirties, thereafter
describing his favourite music as "the sound of radio
commercials at $10 a whack."
Characterized by some as a devout newspaperman, he quipped
that "I buy newspapers to make money to buy more
newspapers to make more money." When asked by Nikita
Khrushchev what good all the money would do him, since
he couldn't take it with him, Thomson replied "Then
I'm not going".
The empire by that stage encompassed more than 200 newspapers
in the US, Canada and the UK (including the flagship Globe
& Mail in Toronto and the Times and Sunday
Times in London), North Sea oil, packaged tours
and television broadcasting ("a licence to print
money"). Like Beaverbrook
and Astor he became a British
citizen and gained a title.
On his death in 1976 son Kenneth restructured the empire:
oil and television was sold, the two Times were
bought by Rupert Murdoch after
management failure to get a grip on the Fleet Street unions
meant they were a licence to lose money, the travel business
went upstream as services to agents rather than retailing.
In the past five years the group has been engulfing specialist
publishers, online and offline, as part of its strategy
to become a dominant player in global online data services
to lawyers, scientists, financial services and other professions.
In 2000, after selling most of its local newspapers it
took a 30% stake in Bell Globemedia (70% owned by telco
BCE), a new company controlling
the CTV television network, the Globe & Mail
national newspaper and Sympatico-Lycos ISP.
Thomson's corporate site is here.
The group formerly published the Financial Times
of Canada, a weekly, tabloid-sized business paper that
began as The Montreal Financial Times in 1912.
It was purchased in 1961 by Southam-Maclean Publications
and moved from Montreal to Toronto in 1975. In 1989 Southam
sold the title to Thomson. The Financial Times
suffered in competition with the Globe & Mail
and the Financial Post, being closed in 1995.
Studies
Roy
Thomson's quirky After I Was Sixty: A Chapter of Autobiography
(London: Collins 1964) and Russell Braddon's Roy Thomson
of Fleet Street (London: Collins 1965) offer a view
of the founder and the early empire.
Ken
Thomson: Canada's Enigmatic Billionaire (Toronto:
Burgher 1996) by Vic Pearson is the standard hagiography
- Thomson collected art, was kind to dogs and small children,
didn't eat journalists for breakfast - decorated with
vignettes of the billionaire's meanness such as bulk purchasing
of stale hamburger buns and cadging lifts from staff.
Big on gossip, short on business analysis.
Susan
Goldenberg's The Thomson Empire: A MultiBillion Dollar
Canadian Dynasty (London: Sidgwick & Jackson 1984)
is a standard corporate biography. Richard Doyle's Hurley-Burley:
A Time At The Globe (Toronto: Macmillan Canada 1990)
and David Hayes' Power & Influence: The Globe &
Mail and the News Revolution (Toronto: Key Porter
1992) are more insightful. For book publishing see in
particular British Book Publishing as a Business since
the 1960s (London: British Library 2004) by Eric
de Bellaigue.
Perspectives on Thomson's ownership of the Times
include Marmaduke Hussey's memoir Chance Governs All
(London: Macmillan 2001) and works highlighted in the
profile on Murdoch.
holdings
The
changing structure of the group - pieces being bought,
moved around, sold off - means that it's easiest to highlight
major products:
Financial
publications and services include American Banker,
AutEx, Electronic Settlements Group (ESG), First
Call, IFR, ILX Systems, PORTIA, Securities Data and The
Globe & Mail.
Thomson
Healthcare provides information, drug databases and communications
to pharmaceutical companies, hospitals, physicians and
managed-care organizations. Its American Health Consultants
unit is the world's largest publisher of healthcare newsletters. Medical
Economics publishes healthcare magazines, directories,
references, newsletters, databases, and new media.
Thomson's
Legal & Regulatory unit - competing with Reed-Elsevier
and Kluwer-Wolters - is one of
the global 'big three' legal, regulatory, tax and accounting
publishers. Print and online brands include Westlaw, Sweet
& Maxwell, Thomson & Thomson, Editorial Aranzadi,
Carswell and RIA. Graham & Whiteside is a leading
international publisher of corporate and professional
information.
Looking
somewhat stodgy (and as of 2005 forecast to be flogged
off during the next wave of restructuring) venerable US
publisher Charles Scribner's Sons is increasingly concentrating
on reference books. Directory giant Gale Group and Jane's
(technoporn for 12 year olds and specialist reference
material about defence, transportation and law enforcement)
look more secure. Scribner includes Atheneum, founded
in 1959 by Simon Michael Bessie (1916-2008) of Harper
& Row, Alfred Knopf Jr and Hiram Haydn of Bobbs-Merrill
with US$1m backing. It was acquired by Scribner in 1978.
Macmillan Reference USA was acquired after the Maxwell
empire got lost at sea and is now to include parts of
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich as part of Reed-Elsevier's
purchase of Harcourt General. It includes Primary Source
Microfilm, a major humanities, social sciences and news
archive. The Taft Group publishes reference works on the
philanthropic sector. Thorndike Press is a major publisher
of Large Print editions.
Chronology
A chronology of the Thomson group is here.
next
page (Thomson holdings)
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