This one is close to my heart, since I have spent 15+ years of my professional life in the Reuters world, successively as a business partner, a senior executive and a venture capitalist.
Rafat points to a great piece from TheDeal.com: Dispatch from Reuters, which goes in quite a bit of detail into the history of M&A deals that have shaped the past 12 years of Reuters.
The piece obviously forgets to mention the 1993 acquisition of Effix (the startup that yours truly was involved in), which was bought for the Unix applications we had developed, and that were competing furiously with Teknekron Software Systems, bought by Reuters in 1994. I'll always remember our first dinner at Il Fornaio after the acquisition, the two teams meeting for the first time and trying to figure out how we'd turn from external enemies into internal allies. But that's another story... and now they are very good friends.
As I was joking with Eric Lint (the Head of Corporate Development of Reuters) over IM, the acquisition of Effix must not have been that bad, since it is one of the only acquired entities that is still alive and kicking in the Reuters Group, developing the Reuters Desktop and the Risk Management product line, amongst many things.
This paragraph summarizes the Reuters situation:
[Started 3+ years ago] A program of divestitures and restructuring, dubbed "Fast Forward," has stabilized and rationalized Reuters, a company that used to have 1,400 products and now has about 50. A couple of well-integrated acquisitions have brought in new talent and helped position the company to better compete with archrival Bloomberg LP. Sometime this year, Reuters expects that revenue from its core financial services businesses will finally stop shrinking and start growing again. And soon — but not yet — CEO Tom Glocer plans to unveil a new corporate strategy. "It's a growth-oriented strategy," is all Glocer will say until July. "And although we're open to a lot of interesting new markets, the good news is that our existing markets, as we've redefined them, have the ability to support decent growth."
As the revenue of financial products finally stabilizes, it sounds as though Reuters is also going to establish a larger footprint directly with consumers, fueled by recent hires such as Janet Scardino, the former VP of International Marketing at AOL. Rafat's audio interview of Chris Ahearn, the President of Reuters NewMedia (and former head of LabMorgan) also clarifies this position.
I still have many many friends in the Group, and wish them all a great success.
Disclosure: I am still a Reuters shareholder.
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