Thomson Reuters AGM: 20 minutes, no questions

“I don’t think we have ever had no questions,” chief executive James Smith told Wednesday’s gathering at Roy Thomson Hall, pictured, a Toronto concert hall named for the founder of the media dynasty that controls the company.

Last year, several investors complained about share-price underperformance at the company, which was struggling amid cost-cutting on Wall Street, one of its biggest customers, and the uneven results of the Reuters merger, The Wall Street Journal reported. This year, shares are doing better, having risen 18 per cent since the start of the year to close today at $34.09 on the New York Stock Exchange and C$34.16 on the Toronto Stock Exchange.

Two of Toronto’s best-known business figures took a bow from the board of Thomson Reuters, a media giant that may be based in New York but still retains many of the vestiges of Canada Inc, the Journal said.

“That’s down to the fact that it’s majority owned and controlled by the Thomson family, Canada’s richest. While family patriarch David Thomson, the company’s chairman, has a famously hands-off approach, the company still hosts its annual meeting in Toronto, as it did earlier Wednesday.”

Thomson told the Journal: “I feel, as I have always, very committed and extremely excited about our businesses and its prospects.”

Geoffrey Beattie, a long-time lieutenant to the Thomson family, and Roger Martin, the outgoing dean of the University of Toronto’s business school, did not standing for re-election to the board. Each man has served just about 15 years on the board of the company and its precursor, Thomson Corp.

“Mr. Beattie, who has been a board member since 1998, was behind some of the old Thomson Corp.’s most lucrative moves, including selling off its newspaper holdings ahead of a crash in valuations in that sector. But he was also a key figure in Thomson Corp.’s 2008 $17-billion takeover of Reuters PLC, a merger whose results so far have been much more mixed,” the Journal said.

He ended his tenure on the board after stepping down last year as president of Woodbridge, the Thomson family investment firm. Martin is ending his long tenure atop the Rotman School of Management, telling journalists last year he’d be concentrating on writing. “I am rebalancing what I do,” he told the Journal at the AGM. ■