The war for financial data wages on, but the battle has been lost — at least for Thomson Reuters.
The news giant will reportedly lay off thousands of employees worldwide as it begins to reel from the battles it is waging with established leaders: for financial data, Bloomberg; for wire service news, the Associated Press.
Thomson Reuters, of course, is the product of a 2008 merger that brought together the Canadian information services company and the revered 161-year-old British news agency. Like Bloomberg, it sells specialized information to subscribers through terminals — but its latest, the Eikon (pictured above), hasn’t quite caught on as hoped, despite a string of technology acquisitions to bolster its platform — including real-time data mining enterprise company Streamlogics in 2009, tick data provider Vhayu in 2009, energy analytics firm Point Carbon A/S in 2010 and banking data and analytics company Highline Financial in 2010.
Further, the company continues to suffer from an existential crisis over its purpose: publisher, or technology provider? The answer is of course both, but that’s cold comfort when revenues aren’t rising.
