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Thomson Reuters Corporation (TRI)

Q4 2009 Earnings Call· Wed, Feb 24, 2010

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Welcome to the Thomson Reuters full year and fourth quarter 2009 earnings conference call. (Operator Instructions) We’ll now like to turn the call over to our host, Senior Vice President of Investor Relations, Mr. Frank Golden. Please go ahead.

Frank Golden

Management

Hello and thank you for joining us today as we review our fourth quarter and full year 2009 results and provide our outlook for 2010. We’ll begin today with Thomson Reuters’ CEO Thomas Glocer. Thomas will be followed by our CFO, Robert Daleo, who will discuss the fourth quarter results. Today’s presentation contains forward-looking statements. Actual results may differ materially due to a number of risks and uncertainties discussed in reports and filings that we provide to regulatory agencies. You can access these documents on our website or by contacting our Investor Relations department. It is now my pleasure to introduce the Chief Executive Officer of Thomson Reuters, Thomas Glocer.

Thomas Glocer

CEO

Thank you Frank, and thank you all for joining us. I plan to cover four topics today. First I’ll discuss our full year results. Second I’ll provide you with selected 2009 highlights. Third, I’ll discuss our market position as we enter 2010, including an update on the progress that we’ve made against my three key priorities. And lastly I’ll discuss our 2010 outlook and where I believe we can take this business over the next few years. Now despite global markets sliding deeper into recession in 2009, Thomson Reuters recorded a solid performance thanks to our proven business model. For the full year we held revenues essentially flat, not a mean accomplishment given the challenging environment. As I stated last quarter and is even more clear today, we’re past the bottom in terms of real economic activity, what our sales teams experience every day. Even though we’re likely to report negative year on year results for the first half of 2010. Now as I begin my discussion of 2009’s results keep in mind that when we compare performance period on period we look at revenue growth before currency as we believe this provides the best basis to measure the underlying performance of the business. I’m pleased with the company’s full performance that hopefully you can see on the slide now if you’re watching on the screen. We were nimble, reallocating resources to higher growth opportunities and geographies, investing in new products, and continuing to make great progress with our integration program. These steps enabled us to hold revenues, grow margins and adjusted EPS, and drive free cash flow. From a net sales standpoint we hit bottom in the second quarter with Q4 positive on a consolidated basis. For the full year total revenue was essentially unchanged against tough prior year…

Robert Daleo

CFO

Thank you Thomas, and good morning everyone. Today I’m going to cover the following topics; our fourth quarter and full year results, an update of our integration programs, and I’ll discuss the dividend announcement and our cash flow. But before I get into specific results for the corporation I’d like to show you an updated version of a slide we first introduced last year at this time. Now this chart illustrates the diversity and resiliency of our businesses and depicts why we successfully held revenues last year. As Thomas noted 2009 was very challenging. However our diverse customer sets, product mix, and global footprint enabled our faster growing businesses to compensate for those businesses that were most impacted by the broader economic environment. As the chart reflects over two thirds of our revenue base recorded growth in 2009. Additionally virtually every one of these segments are improving sales environment as we exited last year which will likely translate into revenue growth in the second half of this year given the subscription nature of our business model. Now turning to the financials in particular, before I begin let me point out that the full year reported revenues were negatively impacted by currency, primarily a strengthening US dollar. However in the fourth quarter we did experience a positive benefit from currency, but throughout today’s presentation I will speak to growth before currency as we believe this is a more relevant metric in measuring the performance of the business. Reported revenues are highlighted on each slide. Let me also note that currency had a muted impact on margins in the current quarter. Consolidated revenues in the fourth quarter were $3.3 billion, this is down 3% while acquisitions contributing 1%. Our underlying operating profit in the quarter was down 16%, and the operating profit…

Frank Golden

Operator

Thanks Robert, just a couple of housekeeping items before we open it for Q&A, first let me direct you to two supplemental appendix slides that we’ve included on our website. The first slide are some additional financial metrics for 2010 including estimates for depreciation and amortization, interest expense, and again an estimated tax rate. The second slide you’ll find is a pie chart that reflects revenue and expenses by major currency for 2009. And the last item I’d like to direct you to on our Investor Relations website is we’ve posted a link for WestLawNext, which includes a product demonstration, the WestLawNext launch video, and several customer testimonials. I believe you’ll find the presentation helpful and it will provide you with a better understanding as to why we’re all so excited about this new product offering. So with that we will open the call for questions.

Operator

Operator

(Operator Instructions) Your first question comes from the line of Drew McReynolds - RBC Capital Markets

Drew McReynolds - RBC Capital Markets

Analyst

My one question for you and it’s a big picture question, it appears as if certainly the visibility on your business has certainly improved quite dramatically sequentially in the quarter, it does sound just by the tone of your comments that net sales are certainly building nicely, the big picture question is when you look at coming out now of the bottom, has the environment permanently changed as a result of the last couple of years in terms of your end markets, and then a follow-up would be when you look at your targeted, medium term or sustainable top line organic revenue growth rate, do you remain confident that that is mid single-digit going forward.

Thomas Glocer

CEO

It’s a great question and its one we spend a lot of time as a management group and as a Board, I think the most honest answer I can give you is we don’t fully know yet. And I think the big variable for everyone is the impact and the nature of global regulatory change is not yet known. And it waivers between let’s start with financial services, some days or weeks when it looks like, hey, things are headed back to the way they were and people acting certainly like that in the markets. And then other weeks where governments are saying, hey haven’t you learned anything, we’re going to have to come in with a big stick. So if I try and look across all our businesses, it’s a probably net positive in legal, a net positive in tax and accounting, in financial services at the moment I would call it neutral. Developments that we’re seeing like the instability in Greece while threatening to the Euro, has actually been fantastic for our FX dealing services. So I think the bottom line is we’re well balance, we’re adjusting along with the markets and in terms of the composite overall picture, I still think this is a business that can and should be capable of mid to high single-digit growth rates and that’s what we’re planning for but I would agree with you there’s a little bit of regulatory uncertainty that hangs through this year.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Phillip Huang – UBS Securities Phillip Huang – UBS Securities : Just on WestLawNext, I know you’ve only launched it at the beginning of the month, but just wondering if you might be able to give us a little bit more color on the initial feedback, I understand its positioned as a premium service and provides significant time savings benefits to customers. How soon can we start to notice the benefit of this product in the numbers. Do you think we need to see law firms being done with cost cutting and return to growing headcount or do you expect to see the benefits show up earlier as a result of market share gains, etc.

Thomas Glocer

CEO

Well I guess the first thing to observe is and we’ve now seen the numbers come out of let’s say our competitors, our established competitors in the legal space, its pretty clear by a wide margin that the existing WestLaw which by the way is a very good product, has already opened up very significant blue water. WestLawNext is sort of oil on that fire if I can mix metaphors. Maybe the best thing I can recommend you do is go do a search into the bloggers sphere, beyond the realm of official superlatives coming out of us, take a look at the law librarian blogs, a Google or [technoraty] search of the blogs will pull up some pretty interesting stuff. I’m not sure if we have the links to it in what we put up on our website, if not Frank can get it to you, but the initial reaction from the sort of skeptical law librarian legal community is very strong. I’ve been playing with it for months. I used the old product, it is a significant world of difference. It is a pleasure to use the product. And then in terms of how do we expect to see the benefit I think it exists on several bases, one is don’t underestimate especially in a market like this the benefit to a sales force of having something new to show. It was a tough year last year across the board. The reaction in our own inside the company at our sales force presentation, is huge and the success stories are running right across the firm. I think we’re up to something like 400 new sales of WestLawNext in less than a month. Externally I think you will see it in terms of a further shift in market share and some uplift in essentially the achieved pricing across the firm and the initial sales bear that out. But its still early days so we don’t want to blow our horn too much but other people seem to be blowing it for us.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of William Bird – Bank of America William Bird – Bank of America : I was just wondering if you could just discuss the scale of the net sales improvement and just your point of view on markets improvement in January and the sustainability of that improvement.

Thomas Glocer

CEO

So I think the, we’ve given you a sort of directional indication in that the progression last year quarter to quarter was by the time you got to the fourth quarter markets was still negative but on a far less negative than say the second quarter. Down some 75% and that’s after a 50% improvement in the third quarter. The only thing that we’ve completed so far this year is January. It is very unusual for us and don’t expect we’re going to go to a month basis, Robert and I really look at average net monthly sales across a quarter because there is a certain lumpiness. We chose to flag it only because I think there’s a natural focus on when do you cross that zero line. We did it as a firm in the fourth quarter which is why we flagged consolidated net sales turning positive. The fact that markets is coming up is also I think really important and that goes to the issue I guess Drew had pointed out in our clarity on forward looking data which is we’re not trying to predict whether the whole economy is V or U or L shaped, what we’re able to say is, look we know what the trend line is. If the trend line continues our net positive sales will turn into net positive period on period reported revenues in the second half. We’d have to go off of that trend which of course is entirely possible, double dip or some other factors for it not to be true and that’s how we sort of give you the composite view of what we think the rest of the year shapes like. A U shape for us with improvement right through the year. William Bird – Bank of America : And I guess what’s your point of view on the sustainability of growth in markets without job growth.

Thomas Glocer

CEO

Well that’s the real focus that the work Devon has been doing in markets and together we did at old Reuters which was we were very badly hurt I think a cumulative 20% fall in revenues from a much milder recession and we were very exposed to headcount and we have progressively reshaped that business to have, its still obviously heads are important, we have some 440, 450,000 terminals in front of people. But we have another 50% plus of revenue which is non headcount dependent, either because its enterprise data feeds and valuation systems, or because its transactions and the recent activity with the volatility in the Euro is a good example, people haven’t laid on a huge number of heads in January but volumes are almost double a year ago. And that’s because obviously of the stresses in the FX market. We participate in that and benefit from that even in a headless recovery. So I guess what I’d say coming back to pull it together is if you were to tell me that banks were now going to go on another 20% headcount purge, that’s clearly negative for our business. If its essentially flat and only minor growth in Latin America, Asia, etc., but continued strength in non headcount markets, we can grow in that environment.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Vince Valentini - TD Newcrest

Vince Valentini - TD Newcrest

Analyst · Vince Valentini - TD Newcrest

The integration seems to be going quite well, I’m wondering if from your perspective the organization and specifically the market segment is ready for the integration of another reasonably large acquisition and maybe as a follow-up to that if there is no large acquisition that occurs this year, is there any chance of using some of that $10.1 billion in cash for further share buybacks.

Thomas Glocer

CEO

I’m going to let Robert since we’re talking balance sheet in part here, I’ll just start with the, markets has a lot on their plate. Very positively, starting with the launch of Utah which is the desktop platform but they’re also really hard at work on the transaction systems, on their low latency data feed efforts. There are a ton of really good things going on in markets. Could they technically do something more, well they’re doing interesting bolt-ons all the time. We just announced a small acquisition called [Agisoft] which adds direct market access capabilities in markets. They can do that, but put it this way, if they have nothing else to do, if we add nothing else to their plate, they’re fully occupied for the year. I’ll let Robert comment on the use of cash.

Robert Daleo

CFO

You’re right to point out and we’re very pleased to have a nice cash cushion going into the year. Last year at this time we had about $850 million roughly. So we are up a bit. And certainly we’re always working to strengthen our businesses and this past year I think we reported about $400 million of acquisitions, many of those small, the largest one being about $100 million I think. And so those are the kind of acquisitions that are really low risk and propel growth and certainly we’re continuing to do that and I think we’re in a good position to do an equal or more of that this year. And that’s what we’ll think about and remember that we do have a dividend commitment and management has always thought that its important, (a) it’s a real value creation for our shareholders so we do dividends rather than stock buybacks at this point, and secondly, we do have some debt coming up for renewal at the end of the year. I think the way to view it is that we’re in a strong position and we can do virtually what we need to do to continue to drive this business and everything we’re doing we’re thinking more about 2011, 2012 and 2013 and how we can position ourselves to take advantage of the return to growth. So we are in a position to do things but I would suspect they would tend to be, they could tend to be smaller and certainly the kind that propel growth for us just as well.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Thomas Singlehurst – Citigroup Thomas Singlehurst – Citigroup I had two questions, just about some the cost in 2010, you talked about the additional 100 basis points of investment, is that a permanent increase in investment levels or does it fall away in short order. And then linked to that, I know you’ve got the flat underlying margin pre investment, but just on the specifics of the corporate costs, is that going to jump up again in 2010. And then the final question was actually back on the larger acquisition side and maybe turning it around, specifically we have IDC and risk metric both with a strategic review under way, is there any threat to your business if they are acquired by any of your major competitors.

Thomas Glocer

CEO

We obviously look at everything that’s out there. We’re very familiar with those assets. I feel very good about the cards we have in our hand. Our businesses are very competitive, thanks to the way we’ve built them. Neither of those assets in and of themselves dramatically change the playing field no matter who’s hands they go to or whether they stay where they are. They’re both well run businesses as they are so we don’t see a dramatic shift there.

Robert Daleo

CFO

In terms of your questions on investments I would view the investments that are effecting the margin as part temporary and part run rate because some of them are as we launch these new products we actually start incurring amortization of investment and other costs that are [inaudible] run rate and the reason why it’s a negative impact is because we don’t see all, the full benefit of the revenues and I think WestLawNext is a great example of that and certainly Utah later in the year. So I think the majority of it would probably be run rate which will be overtaken quickly by revenues and then the other part on corporate costs, we have a really managed corporate costs, the core corporate costs very tightly and kept them flat now for I think certainly 2008 and 2009 and reduced them in 2008 and kept them flat in 2009, and I think in 2010 we will see those costs continue to be flat, the core. Where we had increases, been in pension and benefits and right now we may see some increase in that again in 2010. It may be along the line of what we talked about, but maybe not quite as much as this year but it won’t be essentially flat.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Brian Karimzad – Goldman Sachs Brian Karimzad – Goldman Sachs : On project Utah, so last year on this call it was kind of flagged that it might be a back half 2009 release, now it looks like it will be sometime later this year, you have an alpha release on your desktop which is good although its not a beta, just as you look at this project, first how are you managing customer reaction to some of the delays and then second as you run it through more paces on the veritable [bondable] flats out there what kind of feedback are you incorporating and what are some of the things that you are adding to it with this extra time you’re spending.

Thomas Glocer

CEO

Well the single biggest thing we’re doing now is making sure that the quality is as good as we can possibly make it before we officially declare it released. I’m running an alpha but it’s a very stable load. Its an alpha because several times a week there are significant changes going through it. One of the best things that this platform, because its really a platform more than a product, allows us to do is to transition to a much quicker response to market. The ability to incorporate not only new data but new analytics as the market evolves so quickly it is a significant step up. It doesn’t require a site visit, it doesn’t require golden disks or customers to open up their systems and do rollouts. So we’ll be going to a very broad beta this spring which probably under the way we used to handle releases, we would have already released by now, but the key issue for us in the marketplace is we don’t feel a gun to our heads. The 3000 Extra that I switched off in favor of Utah is a very competitive product so the issue really is when do we get to take our game up rather than a burning, oh my God, we’ve got to get this thing out because we’ve got a problem today.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Paul Steep – Scotia Capital Paul Steep – Scotia Capital: Maybe we could talk about things that are within your control excluding employment so if we look at those 2011 integration synergies and what you need to do to hit those numbers that are cost related or working with customers, what are the top three things on the critical path that would at this point maybe derail or so you get to those numbers sooner.

Thomas Glocer

CEO

You’re right, we look at it the same way that we focus on the things that we can control the most, I’m trying to think about what would most derail us. So we’re, there’s a certain amount of product migration and frankly shutting off product next year so the issue there would really be, if Utah didn’t ship until 2011, that would probably delay us a bit. That’s probably the single largest factor this year otherwise, the plans are very well advanced.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Paul Sullivan – Barclays Capital Paul Sullivan – Barclays Capital : Just a question on the legal business, can you just maybe talk about the broader customer spending patterns you’re seeing in legal and how that’s evolving and in terms of buying patterns, etc. And then specifically on print in legal, how should we view the acceleration in the decline as we went through the second half. Are you seeing, is that part of the unused structural shift there and I don’t know if you can size for us but what proportion of the print business within legal would you regard as nice to have as opposed to must have which will give us a better sense as to the levels which we should start to see stabilization there.

Thomas Glocer

CEO

I don’t have a good answer for you on must versus sort of nice to have in print, but I think I can add a little bit of color. Each time there’s a recession you see a real focus on cost more than just the day in day out and a sort of ratchet down in print and some of that is generational. I’m 50 years old. If I’m going to read 100 page case, I’m going to read it in print rather than the screen. I use the screen for the things it does best, which is search and [citator] etc. I think what Thomson has done remarkably well and not just in legal is manage the transition from print to electronic without sort of having these huge [casyms] where the profit drops out, the revenue growth drops out. If you do the read across to say Lexis Nexis these days in legal they’re overwhelmingly electronic. They have far less of a print component last time I looked in the US. But yet their revenue growth rates are significantly down suggesting that not only are we taking share on the macro level but if you were actually going to compare the electronic to electronic, it would be off the charts. I think a certain amount of that print, a good amount of that print, does stay. Go to the US Supreme Court, they’re not going to throw out the Supreme Court reports, nor will the United States Code Annotated disappear from law libraries. But solo small firms I think over time just don’t have a library at all or if they have one its more to show the clients than it is for the actual work they do. I’m pretty comfortable with the shift. The obvious issue is that print is very profitable, it’s the mix effect that Robert has pointed to and what we’re doing is as the electronic gets scale, then it begins to move up towards those sort of margins but in the interim you see a bit of a mix effect. And all in all I think we’re managing the transition better than any other industry I see.

Robert Daleo

CFO

I’d just like to add some historical perspective, that the decline of print does not necessarily herald the decline of margins in legal group because if you think about the longer term, when Thomson acquired West in 1996 roughly 60% of the revenues were print and only 405 were electronic. In that transition from print to electronic, the margins of the legal group expanded, expanded dramatically I think by almost 10 points. So, during that period, so the challenge that you have is in a short-term period like now where you have dramatic shifts and in fact we don’t have the return to growth and kind of robust growth in online that we are used to enjoying that you would see this effect on the bottom line. I think over the longer term we continue to manage it and we don’t see the longer term issues of margin as dramatic as they are in this short-term period. Paul Sullivan – Barclays Capital : And in terms of the change in customer buying patterns, any changes or anything to report there.

Thomas Glocer

CEO

Well I think the most significant change is really something that WestLawNext is really focused on which is there is pressure on law firms certainly on both sides of the Atlantic to do all in, fixed price deals let’s say you’re doing a bond offering or there is such a thing as a plain vanilla litigation, pressure from general counsels to do flat fees. This is where and people have questioned whether a shift from hourly rates is negative for this business, the really dramatic thing that WestLawNext does is increase the efficiency and so suddenly if you’re a law firm and you’ve agreed to a fixed price to do a deal, you care and your interests are very aligned with your clients, you care deeply about the efficiency so I think we’ve gotten that trick right. In terms of buying patterns, people are under a lot of stress. Law firms are very cash oriented. The lease tends to be the biggest financial purchase or decision they make. I think our guys have been very successful in working with clients. Some of that pressure is easing a little bit but I think 2010 will continue to be a challenging year in the legal market overall and that’s why its so good that we have exciting product to go out with.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Mark Braley – Deutsche Bank Mark Braley – Deutsche Bank : I guess just one question, on the margin guidance you’ve got quite a big year on year increment coming from the cost savings particularly after increasing the target there, and yet you’re steering us towards margins down 100 basis points inclusive of the extra investment, are you really telling us the normalized cost inflation is starting to come back into the business, you’re having to give salary increases again and second, is there any element of care of taking extra cost to fix problems in the completion of Utah in particular. Are we far enough behind plan that you’re having to do things that you didn’t want to do to get that product ready for market.

Robert Daleo

CFO

First the answer is absolutely not, that’s not the reason why the cost trajectory for Utah is geared somewhat to what it was when we first started out and we don’t expect to see any changes. I think what you need to think about is first of all when you say are we starting to see normal cost inflation I think we’ve always had cost inflation. And we’ve been able to cover that. What you have to remember is that this is a very, very leveraged business. And when you have revenue slow down and we haven’t had robust revenue growth, we talked about over the past two years since we’ve come together, we’ve taken the margin from 18.7 to 21.3, that’s 260 basis points of margin improvement. That hasn’t been done in a robust revenue environment. So we have been taking significant costs out both within the integration and outside of it just in normal response to the environment. But in any business of our size and scale you have many cost components that drive the business and so it’s a bit of a challenge to just steady state and say well where are these particular costs. I think the one thing that is true and we’ve said this all along, that this $1.6 billion and $1.2 billion of costs are permanent efficiencies that we will have in the business. And that will allow us when we return to a normal growth environment, to see the flow through and have a restoration and indeed continued improvement in the margins. We have said in the past that our target longer term is 25%, mid 20’s operating margin. We see no reason why we can’t attain that and we see these, and we’ve couched these margin impacts as temporary. And so…

Thomas Glocer

CEO

I think through this year, through 2010 I think we’ll see that strength. Asia for example, we’ve seen this right through so while London and New York haven’t made a lot of noise about labor cost growth given the fact that prices if anything were going backwards, India price wage inflation has been running 10%, 15% right through this and we have a significantly number of our staff in Asia. I’d say coming back to Robert’s themes, I think of this in sort of two very simple ways. One is we need about 2% to 3% revenue growth to see the large costs we’re taking out of the business actually fall to the bottom line. Below that we are eating up some of that margin improvement in temporary reduction in revenue and we have every reason to believe we’re obviously targeting well north of that, but we have every reason to believe we can get back up to that rate. With respect to 2010 in particular, there’s a bunching of spend so its not just Utah, Utah is pretty much on where its cost projections have been all along and now the costs are really in Q&A. Its WestLawNext, was a large dollop of cost, we have the global tax workstation in tax, a new version of Micro Medics, we’re doing a lot of things precisely because we think we can open up competitive strength and you were around at the time you’ll remember, I think Reuters got hurt very badly and got taken out of the market because I had no choice but to cut costs horribly deeply and then had to come back a couple of years later with the big core plus program to restart growth from zero. And that eventually worked but it took a lot longer and was very painful and I remember many of the folks on this call said well your X growth, you’ll never restart growth. We can do it a better way. That does involve a certain bunching of spend because you’ve got to spend to get the growth but we feel its managed in a way that makes 2011, 2012 and 2013 look very good in our model.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Tim Casey – BMO Capital Markets Tim Casey – BMO Capital Markets : Just on Utah, how should we think about it flowing through the P&L, should we assume, you were expecting an acceleration in top line or an acceleration in margin as you’re able to over the course of three years shut down some of the legacy systems and thereby see an improved cost structure.

Robert Daleo

CFO

I think the way we think about it Utah is really a significant platform and infrastructure opportunity for markets that gives them new product capability, so its both ends. It is the revenue side of it and the cost side of it. The revenue side has a bit of a tail to it because part of it is getting customers to convert off of current platforms to Utah. Some of that we think will be easy because it will be so compelling and then the other side of it is that what Utah does from a platform perspective in terms of uniting various and sundry functions and capabilities is that we will see cost savings. And so really it is, the way to look at it is is over the longer term we look at it as a growth play in terms of top line and as a margin play in terms of cost. And that’s the way we’d play it out. I think as far as specifics to that its very, very hard for us to even discuss those at this point. Tim Casey – BMO Capital Markets : Is it fair to think though that the costs fall away late stage because you can’t shut down legacy networks until everybody is off them.

Thomas Glocer

CEO

Its not just, that part is true, you can’t, all the way in the back end you can’t do that, but there are significant amount of cost going on middle and front end. So for example you were not doing a huge amount of development right now on legacy services that we know we’re sunseting so we’re going to see run rate cost advantages even before we shut off the last server. We’ve begun migrating and closing down entire systems including heading towards Reuters Plus shut down in the US and we’ve done it in the UK with Equity Topic as well so there are some savings along the way.

Robert Daleo

CFO

I’d just like to add one point for clarity, is that while we expect to see improvements in the operating performance of markets and part of that is reflected in some of our outward thinking, that by and large the cost of Utah are not in integration. There’s some in there, the vast majority of them are development costs which are on the balance sheet and will be amortized when we launch the product. So we’re not using integration as a way to fund, primarily fund Utah.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Colin Tennant – Nomura Colin Tennant – Nomura : Just a quick one on the regional performance, if I can, I wonder if you could give us a bit more detail on how particularly some of those faster growing markets like Asia might be doing, have done in 2009 and how you see the geographical diversity of revenue growth going into 2010.

Thomas Glocer

CEO

So what we’ve seen through the year is its really thanks to that geographic balance that we have been able to hold revenues as well, let’s go to markets in particular which along with scientific are the most international of the businesses. So Asia has been the most resilient area and has held up quite well. Brazil although it’s a small base numbers I looked at recently was growing double-digit for us. The Gulf is still good so as we’ve come through the year, and as the early negative net sales have worn through, all of the regions have come down but the pattern is still pretty much the same with Asia in the last quarter sort of just turning negative and in terms of reported results and the Americas and EMEA more negative. Colin Tennant – Nomura : And just as a follow-up, you talked a little bit about how you were relocating people, integrating offices etc. around the world and I remember one of the attractions of the merger was that you would be able to leverage the Reuters global footprint for helping to sell and establish the professional businesses, is there any sort of concrete progress on that to date.

Thomas Glocer

CEO

Well in the property integrations, yes very much so, so in New York we’ve early on we got it done really the quickest. We’ve moved to a principally two locations sort of A, B site three times square and 195 Broadway. In London we’ve been moving to a similar strategy of Canary Warf plus the city. We’ve moved in Tokyo and a bunch of other places and every time we do it we try and co-locate both for cost sharing and savings but also very much for the ability to cross fertilize products. One area where probably more than any other we’ve seen it already turn into very tangible product and revenue is the Gulf where we’ve had a really group from professional parachuted into the Dubai old Reuters office and together have launched not only the Islamic Finance Center out of WestLaw business but in 3000 Extra the Islamic Finance Center is beginning to benefit from some of those things coming out of the professional division and that trend will continue.

Operator

Operator

Your final question comes from the line of Randal Rudniski – Credit Suisse Randal Rudniski – Credit Suisse: I just wanted to ask again on margins, did the development of West Next have any impact on Q4 legal margins and in terms of the 100 basis point impact to 2010 margins from investment, that impact occurs because of higher amortization or is there also an OpEx element.

Robert Daleo

CFO

Q4 was not impacted by West Next. We officially launched the product in the first quarter of this year and have begun the sales process so we will see amortization this year. In terms of the margins part of it is certainly amortization of product but there are other operating expenses as well in it. As you roll out a new product, some of them are marketing costs, which will continue and some are obviously marketing sales and there now are some production costs as well related to supporting the product.

Frank Golden

Operator

That will conclude our call. We’d like to thank you very much for joining us today.