Global news and information company Reuters says the worst of a two-year revenue slide is over, sending its shares to a 17-month high.
The company, hit hard by a slump in demand over the past two years, said in a trading update the decline in its first-quarter core subscription revenues would slow to 9 per cent or less. They were falling at a rate of around 11 per cent last year.
Shares in Reuters jumped to a high of 299 pence in early trade, its highest level since August 2002.
"I think it's good news," said analyst Mr Colin Tennant, of US investment bank Lehman Brothers. "The inflection point is the key - it means to me that they are selling more than they are losing [in subscriber cancellations] and you can look forward to revenue growth at some point."
The firm's first-quarter outlook for subscription revenues, which make up over 90 per cent of the core, were at the shallow end of market expectations for a fall of 9 to 10.5 per cent.
Reuters said in its brief statement, issued ahead of annual results next month, that cancellations for the last quarter of 2003 had shown improvement over the previous quarter, extending a trend from the first three quarters of last year.
Reuters sells real-time news and data, mainly under subscription contracts, to banks, brokerages and fund managers via a worldwide network of 445,000 screens. Subscription sales normally take more than a month to translate into revenues.
Reuters shares had already jumped in the run-up to the trading statement on hopes that the company was over the worst. The stock has tripled in value since March 2003 but is down over 80 per cent from its 2000 peak.