Thomson Reuters reports first quarter profit decline

Thomson Reuters, the parent company of the financial news service, reported Tuesday that its first-quarter profit fell by one third while its revenue remained steady.

Tess Stynes and Matt Jarzemsky of Dow Jones Newswires wrote, “Financial news providers were hurt as Wall Street consolidated following the financial crisis and were feeling the effects of weaker sales late into last year. However, the company in February indicated sales trends were improving and that last year likely was the bottom for sales, and predicted a return to revenue growth in the second half of the year.

“Among its effort to attract customers, Thomson recently launched its Elektron network, which will use cloud-computing to send out data rapidly from where it originates. The company was aiming to have the network run 20 times faster than its older platform. Thomson also has been expanding in the area of indexing, recently launching thousands of indices that provides benchmarks for narrowly defined industries in countries worldwide.

“Thomson reported a profit of $134 million, or 15 cents a share, down from $193 million, or 23 cents a share, a year earlier. Underlying operating profit, which excludes costs related to Thomson’s merger with Reuters and other charges, fell to 36 cents from 40 cents.”

Read more here. In the division that houses the news operations, revenue was flat, and profits fell 4.2 percent.