Thomson Reuters will maintain ownership of its Legal, Tax & Accounting and Reuters News businesses and 45 percent of the F&R business. The deal splits off a substantial chunk of the deal made when the former Thomson Corp. acquired the Reuters Group in 2008.
Under the deal, Reuters News will supply news and editorial content to the new partnership under a 30-year agreement. F&R will pay Reuters at least $325 million annually while the new group will be able to use the Reuters name for information feeds and products and services
The problems stemmed from poor market reception for Thomson's Eikon, its desktop trading workstation. Blackstone has said the future is not in desktop hardware but in providing data streams to the financial market.
The resulting financial performance cost several executives their jobs, including CEO Tom Glocer in 2011. Glocer came to the company as CEO in 2007 when Thomson purchased the former Reuters. Since then the company has slowly come back to revenue growth.