The agreement brings together Jiji's leading Japanese-language commodities service J-COM ? with the Reuters Trader for Commodities desktop. The fully integrated, rebranded Reuters Trading for Commodities Advanced Japan (RTCA-JCOM) platform will be jointly marketed and sold by both companies to their client bases.

Mark Smith, Managing Director of Thomson Reuters in Japan, commented: "Thomson Reuters and Jiji Press have had a close and successful working relationship over many years and today's announcement is a natural progression. There's a great deal of interest in the global commodities markets, particularly in Japan, RTCA-JCOM is a winning combination for our clients." Masahiro Nakata, President CEO of Jiji Press, commented: "The integration of J-COM ? with Reuters Trader for Commodities brings our clients a robust offering of leading domestic and international content and capabilities. Our clients will benefit from the best of both worlds on one desktop - the in-depth local knowledge that we're famous for and Thomson Reuters global reach."

RTCA-JCOM combines Jiji's breadth and depth of local real-time commodities news with the global reach of Thomson Reuters news, data, analytics and transaction capabilities. It includes approx. 1,000 news stories per day published by Jiji in Japanese on the domestic commodities market and is backed by Reuters worldwide editorial staff of 2,700 including a network of 175 commodities journalists who provide comprehensive global commodities market coverage. Clients can also access extensive fundamentals content via an intuitive database which offers intelligent insight into the global oil, metals and freight markets.

The integrated platform has access to all major commodity exchanges and emerging markets as well as global OTC prices and can be seamlessly integrated into Excel and the Metastock charting package for deeper analysis.

A Japanese Commodities Forum based on the highly successful Global Oil Forum which is a rich seam of news, market insight, analysis and discussion hosted by Reuters specialist energy & oil market journalists, will provide news commentary and analysis in Japanese from both Reuters and Jiji's editorial desks.

Reuters Trading for Exchanges (RTEx), an order routing function of RTCA-JCOM, makes it possible to route exchange contracts to brokers from a single desk-top to simplify the end-users workflow and trading process.