Thomson Reuters Corporation (TRI), headquartered in Toronto, Canada, is a global provider of business information services. The company’s operations span the Americas, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and the Asia Pacific. Thomson Reuters operates through five segments: Legal Professionals, Corporates, Tax & Accounting Professionals, Reuters News, and Global Print.
The Legal Professionals segment provides integrated legal research and workflow solutions, combining content, tools, and analytics catered to law firms and governments. The Corporates segment delivers content-enabled technology solutions focusing on legal, tax, regulatory, compliance, and IT professionals. The Tax & Accounting Professionals segment supplies tax-focused research and workflow products designed to automate tax workflows for accounting firms’ tax, accounting, and audit professionals.
Reuters News, another segment, furnishes business, financial, and international news to professional and general news consumers. Its offerings are distributed through Reuters News Agency, Reuters.com, Reuters Events, other Thomson Reuters products, and to financial market professionals. The Global Print segment primarily provides legal and tax information in print format to legal and tax professionals, governments, law schools, and corporations. The company, founded in 1851, was formerly known as The Thomson Corporation and adopted its current name, Thomson Reuters Corporation, in April 2008. It operates as a subsidiary of The Woodbridge Company Limited.
May 14, 2023
In the last twelve months alone, the company generated $1.39 billion in net income on $6.63 billion in revenue at a 39% gross margin. This level of profitability is far higher than the sector median 30%, and helps Thomson Reuters remain an industry leader. While its classified as a Specialty Business or a Research and Consulting Service, it’s mainly just a content creator. No media company should be priced north of 10x sales with artificial intelligence about to make it cheaper than ever to compete. Despite tracing its roots back to the 1850’s, today’s Thomson Reuters has zero competitive advantages and could go the way of Yahoo, which is still a useful site, just far less valuable than it was 20 years ago.