Tom Glocer will retire as chief executive officer of Thomson Reuters (TRI), to be succeeded by James Smith, on Jan. 1. The move, announced after business hours on Thursday, comes in the wake of a substantial drop in the value of company stock, down 36% to $26.88 from a high of $42 in February.
Bloomberg reported that Smith, who became COO in a September restructuring, is from the Thomson Corp. side of the business, and in 2005 took charge of its academic publishing division. Reuters reported that Glocer is regarded as the rescuer of Reuters ten years ago through cost-cutting after the dot-com collapse. He also was responsible for putting together Reuters’ acquisition by Thomson Corp. In 2001, he had become the then-British company’s first American and first nonjournalist CEO.
Claudio Aspesi, a London-based analyst for Sanford C. Bernstein, was quoted saying, “The management change suggests that the improvements are not coming fast enough to please the board. The decline in the share price and the sense that the market division was encountering headwinds that had not been fully anticipated was of concern.”