Bloomberg beats Thomson Reuters in revenue/headcount

Investment bank Goldman Sachs, in an equity research paper following a recent meeting with Douglas Taylor, pictured, founder and managing partner of Burton-Taylor International Consulting, summarised his analysis of the $25 billion market data market as follows:

• The market is stagnant and overall is slow growing. It may stay stagnant.
• Persistent layoffs of 2013 set up a lagged impact on results that will make it as challenging, if not more, than 2012 for sell-side facing market data providers.
• Thomson Reuters takes over 25,000 employees to generate $7 billion in financial revenue vs Bloomberg’s $7.8 billion in revenue with 13,000 employees, and platform consolidation is an imperative to improve this. Thomson Reuters’ revenue in its financial and risk division plus media is $7.5 billion, Taylor said. He pointed out that literally thousands of the company’s employees are relatively lower wage data-related positions in places like Bangalore.

Goldman Sachs said the implications of this are that soft volume and lagged impacts from sell-side cutbacks will weigh on Thomson Reuters and FactSet Research Systems, another competitor, through 2013 and 2014.

Taylor’s Florida-based consultancy focuses on helping information, news, software and financial services companies improve performance. Previously he was an executive of Reuters and later Thomson Financial. He joined Reuters in 1987 and spent 15 years in North America, South America and Europe, the last five of which heading Reuters news marketing and product management globally. After leaving Reuters in 2003 and before founding Burton-Taylor in 2006, Taylor served as managing director, customer segment management, marketing & product development, for Thomson Financial in Asia.

Editor’s note: The original version of this story gave Bloomberg’s revenue as $13 billion, which figure was quoted in Goldman Sachs’s paper. Douglas Taylor says this is wrong. He has contacted the bank about the error.

Burton-Taylor’s latest market share and segment sizing data which includes a copy of its market sheet on Bloomberg can be downloaded here.

SOURCE Goldman Sachs ■ Burton-Taylor International Consulting ■