Thomson Reuters has to prove its worth

Hugh Anderson of the Financial Post writes Tuesday about how the newly merged Thomson Reuters will need to prove itself to customers and investors.

Anderson writes, “So what does the slump in the shares of the combined company after they began trading mean? Some investors clearly think the Thomson Reuters advertising message amounts to unintelligent information. A chunk of the merged company’s market — financial services — is on its knees.

“The firm’s top executives see things differently, naturally. They predict the combined businesses will ride through financial-industry storms and a probable recession much better than they would have done on their own.

“This is not as far-fetched as it might seem. The combined organization is less dependent on financial-industry data than its powerful competitor, Bloomberg, partly because Reuters earlier lost a lot of ground in that market to its nemesis.

“Nor is Thomson in the same kind of consumer business as Google or Yahoo. True, we mostly use Google as a starting point when gathering information. But for serious research into something we need for our work, we will usually move on to specialized sources of information such as Thomson Reuters can provide and be willing to pay for it.”

Read more here.