Thomson Reuters makes stock market debut

Thomson Reuters Corp is making its stock market debut today as a top global information company, hoping a portfolio of products from financial to legal and health-care will help it ride out a financial industry downturn.

Shares of the company, formed by Thomson Corp's $16 billion cash and stock purchase of Reuters Group, started trading in London, Toronto and New York this morning.

The new Thomson Reuters, headed by former Reuters chief Tom Glocer, sells electronic news and data to traders, fund managers and analysts, as well as databases and other information to lawyers, accountants, scientists and the health-care industry.

The merger allows Thomson to expand its financial data business from its North American base, adding Reuters strengths in catering to traders to Thomson's business with money managers. And the deal is meant to help Reuters cut its exposure to financial markets, which have been buffeted by the credit crises.

The new company, with headquarters in New York, has annual revenues of $12.5 billion, 50,000 employees and more than 40,000 customers in 155 countries.

Thomson's publishing roots date back to 1934 when Toronto native Roy Thomson bought The Timmins Press in Northern Ontario. The family has since been involved in textbook and newspaper publishing, at one point owning the Times of London. It also has run television stations and travel companies, as well as oil exploration.

Thomson sold The Times in 1981 and sharpened its focus on data publishing when it sold its North Sea oil interests in 1989 and Thomson Travel in 1998. It sold its education business for $7.75 billion last year.

Reuters started in 1851 when German-born Paul Julius Reuter transmitted stock market quotes between London and Paris on the Calais-Dover cable. Before that, he used pigeons to fly stock prices between Aachen in Germany and Brussels.

This was the beginning of the Reuters news service, which now has 2,400 journalists and became the foundation for a $5 billion-a-year news and financial data empire.

The newly formed company's markets division with $7.4 billion in annual sales competes with Bloomberg for financial industry clients. Bloomberg and Thomson Reuters each have about a third of the global financial data market.

Rivals also include Dow Jones & Co, now a unit of Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, and Anglo-Dutch publisher Reed Elsevier. Reed owns the LexisNexis legal database, a competing offering to Thomson's Westlaw, and competes with the company's $5.1 billion-a-year professional division.