The sales update was presented by Reuters chief Tom Glocer at a Merrill Lynch TMT conference in London.

"While not wanting to overplay the importance of a single month's data, we were very pleased to see sales turn positive in May," he said.

However, he stressed that a more important milestone would be the first positive quarter and confirmed that there is no change to Reuters' second quarter recurring revenue guidance of a decline of 6-6.5%.

On the sales front he reported 250 new Dealing positions installed so far this year, marking the first growth in the Dealing community since 1998.

Glocer also talked up the performance of Reuters Knowledge, the vendor's new range of products for research analysts, fund managers and investment bankers, with over 1600 positions installed so far this year.

To build on this success, Reuters has decided to migrate the version of Knowledge targeted at investment bankers to the same Multex technology platform used by the asset management segment.

Seperately, the vendor also announced the launch of Reuters Station, designed to provide buy side clients in the US with seamless navigation between disparate Reuters' acquisitions including Bridge, Multex, Stock Val and Lipper, among others.

Phil Lynch, CEO, Reuters Americas states: "Reuters is bringing a broad spectrum of products, content and technology into a single desktop solution for investment professionals. Our customers asked us to combine our capabilities, cross-asset information and permissioning together. In response we created a high value proposition for the North American market with Reuters Station. Initial take up has been good with a number of new customers signing up, including JMP Securities with 70 positions of Reuters Station displacing competitive products."

Despite the positive noises Reuters' shares closed down a few percentage points on the day, amid unconfirmed market speculation that Bloomberg was gearing up to challenge Reuters' datafeed business.