Thomson Buying AFX from Agence France

Posted 15 June 2006 @ 06:26 pm EET     Print     Reprint     E-Mail     Comments

New York (Reuters) - Electronic publisher Thomson Corp. is buying the AFX News Ltd. business news agency from Agence France-Presse, the companies said on Wednesday.

The companies did not reveal the price, but a source familiar with the transaction said the deal was worth just under $20 million.

London-based AFX is a real-time European news service that provides business, financial and economic news.

Donal Smith, Thomson Financial's President of Europe and Asia, said the strategy behind the deal was an aim to serve the company's investment banking and corporate finance customers with very specialized news. Thomson Financial is a division of Thomson Corp.

"We are not trying to compete with general business news services all the news we provide is highly specialized and highly targeted," Smith told Reuters in a telephone interview.

"This is really about creating deeply specialized news services for investment bankers and fund managers, rather than another business news wire."

He aims to increase the number of reporters and number of offices. AFX currently has just over 100 journalists in about 12 bureaux around Europe. A spokesman for Thomson said the aim was to roughly double the number of journalists in about 18 months.