Thomson Reuters returns to Canada
Launches new technology centre in Toronto
Multinational media giant Thomson Reuters Corp. announced a return home of sorts on Friday, saying it will open a new technology centre in downtown Toronto and relocate its top executives to Canada’s largest city.
To be christened the Toronto Technology Centre, the new office will increase the company’s 1,200- strong workforce i n Canada by 400 over the next two years. Thomson Reuters said it has plans to add a total of 1,500 jobs at the centre over an unspecified period of time, and will begin recruiting immediately.
The reveal was made Friday at an announcement by Thomson Reuters CEO Jim Smith, with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne and Toronto Mayor John Tory in attendance.
While Thomson Reuters is domiciled in Ontario, the company’s headquarters is in New York City’s Times Square. As part of the new initiative, Smith and CFO Stephane Bello will relocate to Toronto in 2017 and additional management roles will be moved to or hired on in the city in years to follow.
Their move north marks a homecoming for the company to a market where it once owned and operated a national chain of newspapers, before expanding into a global information services provider in the financial, legal and professional sectors. Thomson Reuters currently does business in more than 100 countries, and employs over 50,000 people. In 2015, it made a US$ 2.1 billion profit on US$12.2 billion in revenues.
“It will be a global centre of excellence that will focus on certain tech jobs that we believe we need the skill sets to survive and thrive off in the future,” Smith said in an interview. “We’re going to focus our efforts around cognitive computing, artificial intelligence and around data visualization skills. These will be software engineering jobs, they’ll be data science jobs and this will be a place where we build new software tools and products that we use in all our businesses across the world.”
In the immediate term, the Toronto Technology Centre will make its home in Bremner Tower, a downtown Toronto office owned by the British Columbia Investment Management Corp.
“Our move here is all about talent and access to that talent,” Smith said.
“What we found in the Toronto-Waterloo corridor was a very rich bed of talent: 200,000 tech workers, a network of sixteen universities graduating 4,500 hightech- enabled people every year, an incredibly diverse community and an established network of publicprivate partnerships that can come up with things l i ke Communitech, DMZ and MaRS.”
The 200,000 tech jobs in the Toronto and Kitchener-Waterloo areas are about half as many as there are in Silicon Valley.
Trudeau said Thomson Reuters’ decision follows conversations he had with Smith at this year’s World Economic Forum in Davos, as well as a subsequent faceto-face meeting in New York. The prime minister noted that International Trade Minister Chrystia Freeland, who left her job as an editor at Reuters before she was elected to Parliament in 2013, also worked extensively as part of a team to woo the multinational back to Canadian soil.
“Today’s announcement is a testament to a broader innovation culture that is quickly enveloping our communities across Canada,” Trudeau said. “We’re not surprised that an increasing number of national and international companies are investing in Canadian talent.”
Tory believes t he announcement is indicative of the strong business appeal Toronto has as an emerging megacity in a small but diverse national market, and hopes Thomson Reuters will not be the first major global company to make the move.
“It’s not a down note to say we’re a relatively small country in some respects” he said, before offering Smith — who cheers for the New York Yankees — a Toronto Blue Jays lapel pin. “And now we have this global champion, a Canadian multinational, and it’s great to see them return their decision- making here alongside this great historic investment in the technology centre. There’s no reason we can’t repeat this day over and over again.”
This big dip into Canada follows two smaller tests of the water: last year Thomson Reuters opened a lab at Kitchener-based start-up incubator Communitech and last month announced it would undertake a five-year, $ 20- million partnership with the nearby University of Waterloo to fund a research chair in data cleaning.
The company is chaired by David Thomson, t he scion of Toronto’s prominent Thomson family, and is majority- owned by the family’s private holding company The Woodbridge Company Limited.
One of Woodbridge’s other media properties, The Globe and Mail newspaper, announced last month that it would be cutting 40 staff through a mix of buyout offers and layoffs where necessary.