The FT’s Alphaville is doing a good job of moving the Reuters takeover story
along, giving not only details
of Reuters’ "Founders Share", which prevents hostile takeover bids,
but also a plausible
description of who’s saying what: apparently Canada’s Thomson offered 600p
per share, and Reuters replied they would only start talking at 750p per share.
The bid can be seen as some kind of vindication for Reuters CEO Tom
Glocer, who has made his company more attractive than it was only a
couple of years ago. On the other hand, the share
price has hardly taken off – until today – and the venerable
Reuters, mortifyingly, continues to have a smaller share of the market for financial
data than the upstart Bloomberg.
Reuters is a news company by brand, but a financial-data company by revenue.
Both sides of the company have a reputation of being very high quality, if slightly
boring. Being owned by Thomson, which is also a little on the boring side, wouldn’t
be such a bad thing, although I’m not sure how the UK hacks will take the news.
My guess is that if Thomson does bag Reuters, it’ll actually change its name
to Reuters as well: one could argue that it’s the world’s strongest brand in
the business of news.