THOMSON Corporation, the Canadian publishing group, wants to expand in Europe by acquiring legal publishers in competition with Reed Elsevier and taking share from Reuters in the financial information market.

The company generated only 18 per cent of its $8 billion (£4.4 billion) revenues from outside North America last year, a level that it wants to increase to between 25 and 35 per cent in each of its four main lines of business. Richard Harrington, chief executive, told The Times: “In the legal and regulatory framework it is difficult to expand organically, particularly when you want to enter new markets, so we’d look for acquisitions. We would like to have larger positions in Germany, France and Italy.”

The legal division contributes 16 per cent of revenues outside North America. It wants to raise this level to 25 per cent. It also wants to lift the non-North American revenues of its financial arm, which competes with Reuters and Bloomberg, to 35 per cent from 20 per cent. It aims to do this by offering tailored products to market niches such as fund managers and investment bankers.

However, the financial arm’s market share outside North America is only about 8 per cent, well behind Bloomberg and Reuters.

Expanding outside North America would mean Thomson, which has a market value of $22 billion, taking on European groups at home. As well as Reuters in financial data, Thomson competes with Reed in the market for legal and scientific information and with Pearson in the higher education market. Mr Harrington said that Thomson’s advantage was that it was “not a holding company” but was trying to replicate the same business model — of delivering electronic information to professionals — in every market it operated.

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