Thomson Financial Announces a Business Alliance Agreement Between Nikko Investor Relations and Thomson Financial Investor Relations

NEW YORK (PROTEXT) - Thomson Financial (TF) today announced a business alliance agreement between Nikko Investor Relations (NIR), a subsidiary of Nikko Securities, and Thomson Financial Investor Relations (TFIR), a division of TF. The alliance aims to provide Nikko Securities with international IR capabilities and TFIR with expanded access to the Japanese IR market. "We are pleased to align ourselves with an organization as prestigious as Nikko. The relationship will expand TFIR's IR business in the Japanese market and provide Nikko with a global IR capability for its clients," said Jay Nadler, CEO of TFIR. "We believe that targeting and valuation analysis, investor relations techniques widely used today in North America and Europe, will be valuable in Japan. Through this alliance we will be better able to introduce these services to Japanese corporations," Nadler continued. Masashi Kaneko, President of Nikko Securities said, "Investor relations is very important to assist our clients in the global capital markets today. We can now offer our clients a value-added investor relations program through the business alliance with TFIR." The NIR-TFIR alliance will offer services including foreign shareholder identification, foreign proxy solicitation, message development and a global investor relations database of investment professionals, shareholding information and brokerage research reports. The alliance was announced on December 6th at the '99 IR Conference sponsored by the Japan Investor Relations Association (JIRA) held at the Royal Park Hotel in Tokyo. Thomson Financial Investor Relations provides information and consulting services that assist public corporations worldwide in identifying, analyzing and communicating with their shareholders. Thomson Financial Investor Relations serves over 3,500 corporations worldwide. For more information visit the TFIR website at http://www.thomsonir.com. Thomson Financial is a US$1 billion provider of information services and work solutions to the worldwide financial community. Through the widest range of products and services in the industry, Thomson Financial helps clients in more than 70 countries make better decisions, be more productive and achieve superior results. Thomson Financial is part of The Thomson Corporation (TTC), one of the world's leading information companies. TTC, with annual revenues of more than US$6 billion, has interests in specialized information and newspaper publishing. TTC's common shares are traded on the Toronto, Montreal and London stock exchanges. For more information, visit http://www.thomsonfinancial.com. ots Original Text Service: Thomson Financial Investor Relations Internet: http://www.newsaktuell.de Contact: Kim Collins, Vice President, 212-509-5100, or Yoshiko Iwata, General Manager - Tokyo, 81-3- 5218-6690, both of Thomson Financial Investor Relations Web site: http://www.thomsonfinancial.com Subscribers please note that material bearing the slug "PROTEXT" is not part of CTK's news service and is not to be published under the "CTK" slug. Protext is a commercial service providing distribution of press releases from clients, who are identified in the text of Protext reports and who bear full responsibility for their contents. PROTEXT