NEW YORK – Thomson Reuters (TSX/NYSE: TRI), a leading source of intelligent information for businesses and professionals, today announced its intention to divest its healthcare business, which has been part of the company’s healthcare and science segment. The healthcare business provides data, analytics and performance benchmarking solutions and services to companies, government agencies and healthcare professionals.
With leading assets and solutions such as MarketScan, Advantage Suite, Micromedex, CareDiscovery and ActionOI, coupled with expert services and analysis, the healthcare business provides its customers with solutions to identify savings, improve outcomes, fight fraud and abuse and more efficiently manage their healthcare operations.
“Our healthcare business is recognized for its innovative solutions and its expertise which are critically important to its customers,” said Thomas H. Glocer, chief executive officer of Thomson Reuters. “We are grateful for the hard work and dedication of our talented employees who have built the healthcare business into a successful and profitable unit.”
“Thomson Reuters has strong positions in our chosen markets and we believe we will achieve better all-in returns for our shareholders by divesting the healthcare business and re-deploying the proceeds in our core franchises. We have leading positions in global markets, including legal, tax and accounting, science and intellectual property, financial services and media, where we see significant opportunities for future growth and profitability. While a growing and profitable unit, our healthcare business lacks the integration with and global scale of our other units, and our disciplined approach to capital allocation convinced us that the expected proceeds from a sale into a consolidating market could be better applied elsewhere in our portfolio,” said Glocer.
The healthcare business in 2010 had revenues of approximately $450 million and an operating margin comparable to the company’s consolidated margin of 19.3 percent. Following adjustment for this divestiture by removing healthcare’s results from ongoing businesses, no material impact is expected to the company’s previously announced 2011 outlook. The company expects the divestiture to close before the end of the year.
This divestiture will result in a realignment of the company’s existing intellectual property and science businesses into a single operating unit of the professional division. Both are global and support scientific research, discovery and innovation. Details related to the realignment can be found in the “investor relations” section of the Thomson Reuters website. Thomson Reuters will provide restated historical financial information on its Web site, which reflects this realignment and which excludes results from the healthcare business, early in July and its second quarter reported results will reflect these changes.
Morgan Stanley and Allen & Company are acting as financial advisors to Thomson Reuters for the proposed divestiture.
