TORONTO (Reuters) - Thomson Corp., the electronic publisher rumored as a potential bidder for financial data and news company Reuters Group Plc, has been no stranger to acquisitions since its founding family bought its first newspaper in small-town Canada in the 1930s.
From their roots as newspaper proprietors, dealmaking has been the bread and butter of the Thomsons. The family has been involved in everything from publishing textbooks and newspapers, including the Times of London, to running television stations and travel companies.
It even dabbled in oil exploration at one time.
In the process, the Thomsons have become one of the wealthiest families in the world, with a net worth estimated at $22 billion by Forbes magazine. The family still holds 70 percent of Thomson Corp.'s shares, through their investment company Woodbridge Co. Ltd..
Today, the company has moved away from paper publishing and is known for its sprawling electronic data operations. It provides software, information and other applications for professionals in law, finance, health care, and science and is selling its education division for an estimated $5 billion.
It had 2006 revenues of $6.6 billion and about 32,000 employees with operations in 37 countries.
What started with the 1934 purchase of The Timmins Press in northern Ontario by Roy Thomson - the grandfather of present chairman David Thomson - has grown into a publicly traded giant with a market capitalization of $28 billion.
Firmly a newspaper and TV company throughout the 1940s and '50s, Thomson branched out into tour travel in Britain in 1965. Then, in 1971, it joined a consortium to explore for oil and gas in the North Sea.
The same decade, Thomson sold its interest in Scottish Television, which it had held since 1957. By the late 1970s, the company's present focus first began taking shape with the purchase of Wadsworth, a college textbook and professional book publisher.
In 1980, it bought Warren, Gorham & Lamont, an information provider for finance professionals - the same year that Thomson's total daily newspaper circulation broke the 1 million mark in Canada.
In a directional shift, Thomson began to exit newspapers in 2000 and finished the process three years later with the $279 million sale of its 20 percent stake in Canada's Bell Globemedia, to Woodbridge. Bell Globemedia owns the Globe and Mail national newspaper.
But Thomson Corp.'s departure from its newspapering days perhaps started as early as 1981, when it sold The Times of London and snapped up a health care information provider and a publisher of career, technical and vocational textbooks.
It sharpened its focus on data publishing further when it sold its North Sea oil interests in 1989 and Thomson Travel, for $2 billion, in 1998.
As acquisitions of financial, legal and education businesses continued at a rapid clip, Thomson offloaded its North American community newspaper assets in 2000 for about $2.5 billion.
By the time its former chairman and Canada's richest man, Ken Thomson, died at age 82 last year, the company had shed the vast majority of its print assets and became focused on electronic data publishing. About 80 percent of its revenue came from electronic products, software and services in 2006.
However, perhaps unable to entirely let go of its roots as a news proprietor, Thomson bought AFX News in 2006 to grow its European business and financial news offering.
Then, on Friday, a media report pegged the company as being in talks for a possible bid for Reuters - a deal which would push Thomson firmly into the foreground of global news gathering and further expand its financial data offerings.
(Reporters and editors involved in the writing and editing of this report may own Reuters securities and are bound by the Reuters Code of Conduct, which restricts dealing in securities in companies a journalist is reporting on.)
