LONDON: Like other globetrotting executives, Tom Glocer travels with multiple cellphones, a laptop and a BlackBerry. But when he lands in Tokyo, he has an additional request - a phone running on the Japanese i-mode system, delivered in his chauffeured car, so he can check out the latest mobile services during the hour-and-a- half drive into town.
"Unless you play with the technology of an era, you're never going to dream the big dreams," said Glocer, the chief executive of Reuters, the financial news and data service based in London.
That Glocer, 46, can talk about dreams suggests that much has changed at Reuters, which a few years ago seemed more concerned with mere survival.
When Glocer took over as chief executive in 2001, the company had what he called an "arrogant culture." It could trace its roots to Paul Julius Reuter, who transmitted stock quotations between European cities in the middle of the 19th century via telegraph cables and carrier pigeons, but it was having a hard time competing in the modern marketplace. Other providers of financial information, led by Bloomberg News, were running rings around Reuters, by many accounts.
Glocer responded by cutting costs aggressively, reducing employment to about 15,000 today from more than 19,000 at the end of 2001. He presided over an overhaul of the company's product line, moving from what analysts called a confusing array of desktop computer terminals and data offerings to a relative handful. More recently, he has begun to push Reuters into new areas, encouraging its employees to do a bit of dreaming, or at least experimentation.
"What we are doing is trying to inspire creativity in a place that had a near-death experience," said Glocer, the first American chief executive at Reuters. "It was like the British Empire - it had become a bit complacent."
Some analysts say there is still work to be done, despite encouraging signs. For 2005, Reuters reported its first annual revenue growth since 2001, to £2.4 billion, or $4.5 billion. Net income, meanwhile, rose to £482 million last year from £375 million the year before. The company recently said it had stopped the long-term erosion of its share of the $10 billion-plus market for financial data, pulling even with Bloomberg at 27 percent.
David Anderson, editor of Inside Market Data Reference, which tracks the financial information business, said Reuters was still growing more slowly than Bloomberg and other competitors, like Thomson of Canada. Using a methodology different from that used by Reuters, Anderson arrives at a 23 percent market share, trailing Bloomberg's 31 percent.
Anderson and other analysts said precise market shares were difficult to calculate, in part because Bloomberg is a privately owned company that discloses less about its finances than Reuters does. Even Reuters acknowledged that the market share gain it claimed stemmed largely from adding Telerate, a smaller data service that it acquired last year.
But even if Reuters is not winning back market share from Bloomberg, Anderson said, it is finally putting up a fight. "Reuters has turned a corner, and they're obviously doing better," he said.
As Reuters battles back, it is seeking to strike broader deals with clients, as evidenced by an agreement with Citigroup this winter in which Reuters provides the bank with desktop terminals but also extras like wireless data delivery for the bankers' BlackBerrys. Reuters also feeds raw data straight from various financial exchanges to Citigroup, providing more detailed and more frequently updated information about incremental price movements than traditional terminal-based services can deliver, the company says.
Such data feeds are in demand as big banks and other market players let computers do many of the jobs that humans once did, pushing virtual buttons to buy and sell stocks, bonds and other securities on the basis of tiny movements in price or data that are sometimes updated many times a millisecond. Some analysts estimate that as much as one-quarter of all trading is already done this way, through what is known as programmed or algorithmic trading.
Reuters has an established and growing market in managing these data links, but Bloomberg is also getting into the business, rolling out a similar offering called B-Pipe. Bloomberg, which has a publishing partnership with the International Herald Tribune, declined to comment for this article.
Glocer said the interest in raw data feeds could reduce the importance of desktop terminals in the industry.
"The way the business is evolving, it's not going to be about a person in front of a terminal anymore," he said.
That helps to explain Glocer's eager ness to experiment with new projects. In one of these, Reuters engineers at Canary Wharf in London are trying to teach computers to read the news. While computers can easily scan numerical data, the idea is to get them to do the same with written articles.
The machines could then look for historical patterns in news and trade accordingly - in a small fraction of the time it would take humans to perform the same task. An urgent headline about an attack on an oil facility in the Gulf, for instance, might prompt the computer to bet on a surge in oil prices.
While that project remains in development, others have been introduced as commercial products. In May, Reuters announced a partnership with the Chicago Mercantile Exchange to expand its presence in currency trading through a new electronic trading system that operates a bit like a stock exchange, with centralized clearing of trades.
In the past winter, the company announced an agreement with MasterCard under which Reuters gleans credit card sales data to create an index of U.S. retail sales a week before the government releases its figures. Because the actual figures often move markets, an early read is valuable for traders.
"You can't program-trade these kinds of things, but people need news, data and analysis to do them," Glocer said.
With 2,400 journalists globally, news is something that Reuters produces in abundance. Glocer said he considered news gathering an integral part of Reuters's business. The company disclosed plans last week to hire an additional 100 journalists to expand coverage of lifestyle and entertainment topics and of fast-growing economies like those of India and China.
In terms of revenue it generates directly, journalism is a tiny part of its business. The media division, which distributes the news agency's output to newspaper publishers and broadcasters and sells advertising on the Reuters Web sites, accounts for less than 10 percent of total sales.
Yet the business of the Web site is also one of the fastest-growing areas at Reuters, with double-digit revenue gains, Glocer said.
The news agency is also finding some new outlets for its work, including a partnership with The Times of India in which Reuters provides content for a 24-hour English-language television news channel called Times Now.
Some analysts say Glocer's initiatives may not generate enough revenue to justify the investment. While the company's shares are trading at roughly four times their 2003 lows, the recovery seems to have stalled in recent months.
"There is little doubt that Reuters management did an extremely good job in the cost-cutting phase of the business," Patrick Wellington, an analyst at Morgan Stanley, wrote in a note to clients. But he added, using the company's internal project name for some of its new ventures: "The jury is out on whether Core Plus will work."
Given the pace of change in the media and information business, Glocer said, a bit of uncertainty suits him fine. He wants others at Reuters to take the same view, even if that means the company might head in unexpected directions.
"Even Google, who are very smart people, didn't set out to build a new advertising model - they set out to build a search engine," Glocer said. "So I'm not convinced that things will ever work out exactly the way people say they will."
