Thomson Group: Overview (original) (raw)
overviewholdingschronology
overviewThis profile considers the Thomson publishing group.
The multinational Thomson group in mid February 2000 announced that it was essentially abandoning print in favour of electronic publishing.
In mid-July 2000 it disposed of its remaining travel businesses for several billion dollars and subsequently transferred the Globe & Mail to a joint venture with Bell Canada Enterprises (BCE), the television, telephone and multimedia conglomerate.
The group formerly owned a string of Canadian newspapers and was a rival of Conrad Black's Hollinger chain (now largely dismembered through sale of its Canadian properties to CanWest and acquisition of the UK titles by the Barclay brothers).
the company
Based in Toronto, the group is still predominantly owned by the Thomson family, worth upwards of US$16 billion. Roy Thomson - once described as "an animated cash register" - bought a Canadian radio station in the thirties, thereafter describing his favourite music as "the sound of radio commercials at $10 a whack."
Characterized by some as a devout newspaperman, he quipped that "I buy newspapers to make money to buy more newspapers to make more money." When asked by Nikita Khrushchev what good all the money would do him, since he couldn't take it with him, Thomson replied "Then I'm not going".
The empire by that stage encompassed more than 200 newspapers in the US, Canada and the UK (including the flagship Globe & Mail in Toronto and the Times and Sunday Times in London), North Sea oil, packaged tours and television broadcasting ("a licence to print money"). Like Beaverbrook and Astor he became a British citizen and gained a title.
On his death in 1976 son Kenneth restructured the empire: oil and television was sold, the two Times were bought by Rupert Murdoch after management failure to get a grip on the Fleet Street unions meant they were a licence to lose money, the travel business went upstream as services to agents rather than retailing.
In the past five years the group has been engulfing specialist publishers, online and offline, as part of its strategy to become a dominant player in global online data services to lawyers, scientists, financial services and other professions.
In 2000, after selling most of its local newspapers it took a 30% stake in Bell Globemedia (70% owned by telco BCE), a new company controlling the CTV television network, the Globe & Mail national newspaper and Sympatico-Lycos ISP.
Thomson's corporate site is here.
Studies
Roy Thomson's quirky After I Was Sixty: A Chapter of Autobiography (London: Collins 64) and Russell Braddon's Roy Thomson of Fleet Street (London: Collins 65) offer a view of the founder and the early empire.
Ken Thomson: Canada's Enigmatic Billionaire (Toronto: Burgher 96) by Vic Pearson is the standard hagiography - Thomson collects art, is kind to dogs and small children, doesn't eat journalists for breakfast - decorated with vignettes of the billionaire's meanness such as bulk purchasing of stale hamburger buns and cadging lifts from staff. Big on gossip, short on business analysis.
Susan Goldenberg's The Thomson Empire: A MultiBillion Dollar Canadian Dynasty (London: Sidgwick & Jackson 84) is a standard corporate biography. Richard Doyle's Hurley-Burley: A Time At The Globe (Toronto: Macmillan Canada 90) and David Hayes' Power & Influence: The Globe & Mail and the News Revolution (Toronto: Key Porter 92) are more insightful.
holdings
The changing structure of the group - pieces being bought, moved around, sold off - means that it's easiest to highlight major products:
Financial publications and services include American Banker, AutEx, Electronic Settlements Group (ESG), First Call, IFR, ILX Systems, PORTIA, Securities Data and The Globe & Mail.
Thomson Healthcare provides information, drug databases and communications to pharmaceutical companies, hospitals, physicians and managed-care organizations. Its American Health Consultants unit is the world's largest publisher of healthcare newsletters. Medical Economics publishes healthcare magazines, directories, references, newsletters, databases, and new media.
Thomson's Legal & Regulatory unit - competing with Reed-Elsevier and Kluwer-Wolters - is one of the global 'big three' legal, regulatory, tax and accounting publishers. Print and online brands include Westlaw, Sweet & Maxwell, Thomson & Thomson, Editorial Aranzadi, Carswell and RIA. Graham & Whiteside is a leading international publisher of corporate and professional information.
Looking somewhat stodgy (and to be flogged off during the next wave of restructuring?) venerable US publisher Charles Scribner's Sons is increasingly concentrating on reference books. Directory giant Gale Group and Jane's (technoporn for 12 year olds and specialist reference material about defence, transportation and law enforcement) look more secure.
Macmillan Reference USA was acquired after the Maxwell empire got lost at sea and is now to include parts of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich as part of Reed-Elsevier's purchase of Harcourt General. It includes Primary Source Microfilm, a major humanities, social sciences and news archive. The Taft Group publishes reference works on the philanthropic sector. Thorndike Press is a major publisher of Large Print editions.
Chronology
A chronology of the group is here.