TORONTO -- David Thomson, Third Baron Thomson of Fleet and current patriarch of Thomson Corp.'s founding family, is, like his father, a quiet billionaire.
He has maintained Ken Thomson's penchant for staying out of the limelight, despite the Canadian family's enormous wealth — pegged at $22 billion by Forbes magazine — and his post as Thomson Corp.'s chairman.
With Thomson Corp. in talks to buy financial data and news provider Reuters Group Plc for $17.6 billion, the family stands to become more prominent, but David Thomson's profile may not be raised.
Little has been written about him. He prefers privacy as much as his father, who died last year at age 82 and who was known as an avid art collector.
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David Thomson, 49, doesn't usually use his inherited British title, according to a company spokesman.
One of the only known at-length interviews he has given has been to author James FitzGerald, in his book "Old Boys: The Powerful Legacy of Upper Canada College."
In his comments to FitzGerald, made more than a decade ago, Thomson reflected on the difficulty of balancing professional and personal lives.
"When you try to live a more balanced life, traditional businessmen think that you are not a real man," Thomson is quoted as saying in FitzGerald's book. "But who is not the real man? You are telling me? You have not taken a weekend with your wife, you have no spare time that you use constructively, you do not have any hobbies, you do not know how to spell Mozart.
"And here you are telling me that I am weak? It is pathetic."
In an interview with Reuters, FitzGerald said he felt at the time that Thomson was coming to grips with the business-savvy legacy of his family.
"I think he was sort of wrestling with this burden of having to live up to some expectation as a businessman," FitzGerald said.
CORPORATE CAREER
If Thomson's acquisition of Reuters goes through as planned, the family's stake of the combined Thomson-Reuters would be diluted to 53 percent from the 70 percent stake it now has in Thomson Corp., but it would retain control.
Thomson and Reuters have said they expect the combination to squeeze more than $500 million of cost savings annually within three years of completing the transaction.
There are also expectations that Thomson will maintain its long-held corporate culture of keeping a tight rein on operating costs at its publishing assets.
"It is a frugal culture. Their ideal is to cut costs and keep them as low as possible even if that means sacrificing quality at times," said Chuck Hill, a former research director of Thomson Financial, who is now chief executive of investment research firm Veritas et Lux.
Relatively little is known by outsiders about David Thomson's role at Thomson Corp.
He began his business career in 1979 working in corporate finance at a big Canadian investment firm, but the following year he joined Hudson's Bay Co., the venerable Canadian retailer.
Thomson later became president of Hudson's Bay subsidiaries Zellers and Simpsons. In 1990, he joined Woodbridge Co. Ltd., the Thomson family's investment firm.
He joined Thomson's board of directors in 1988 and became chairman in May 2002.
The company's day-to-day management has been led by Chief Executive Richard Harrington and other professional managers.
If the deal to buy Reuters is finalized, Harrington, 60, will retire and the combined entity will be headed by current Reuters CEO Tom Glocer.
Harrington would leave behind a legacy of dealmaking that saw at least 35 transactions since his appointment in 1997, including the decision by Thomson to exit the newspaper business and the pending sale of its education division for an estimated $5 billion or more.
He also was responsible for reshaping Thomson from a textbooks, information and newspaper company into a more flexible electronic publisher of legal, financial and other data.
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