Pearson, publisher of the Financial Times, said on Monday it would be a ”worthy competitor” for News Corp if Rupert Murdoch’s company succeeded in buying the Wall Street Journal. It said it was exploring TV tie-ups to strengthen its position.
Pearson, which also includes Penguin books and educational publishing, had considered a counterbid with the help of General Electric for the Journal‘s owner, Dow Jones.
The move did not make financial sense but it remained in talks with GE, which controls the CNBC cable business channel, about possible cooperation to counter the combined strength of Dow Jones and News Corp’s Fox Business news channel, which launches in the autumn.
According to Pearson’s chief executive, Marjorie Scardino, the FT has been in talks with a number of potential broadcasting partners.
”We are still talking to CNBC and others about whether they might be a good channel for us,” she said. ”We have kind of had a talk with everybody. We got very involved with CNBC because they are trying to beef up their business news just as we are trying to find new ways to deliver business news.”
She was speaking after Pearson reported that pre-tax profits almost trebled in the first half to £40-million and were up 74% to £54-million on an underlying basis. Penguin profits were up 11% with a boost from cost-saving schemes. Pearson’s dominant education arm, which spans training programmes for professionals, schools testing and nursery school teaching, made a first-half profit of £5-million after breaking even a year ago.
Pearson makes most of its sales and almost all its profits in the second half because of the seasonal nature of educational publishing and Scardino described the first-half update as providing a ”strong hint” of potential for the full year.
At the newspapers division profits jumped 28% as Financial Times subscriptions rose 12% and FT.com subscribers rose 12% to 97 000.
Scardino, who once famously remarked that the FT would be sold ”over my dead body”, the paper was ”doing fantastically well” and played down the latest round of speculation it could be put on the block.
Without directly answering the question of whether Pearson wanted to keep the FT, she referred to the advantages of being owned by a wider group.
”I think the FT has never been better,” she said. ”Its circulation is up, unlike just about any newspaper you can think of. We’ve raised the cover price all over the world. I don’t know many newspapers that are confident enough to do that.”
With News Corp waiting to find out whether the Journal‘s controlling family would accept its $5-billion buyout offer, Scardino said the FT would not be complacent about any increased competition.
”What intelligent person would be sanguine about competing with anybody, but I think we’ll be a pretty worthy competitor for News Corp,” she said.
As for whether Pearson was braced for an approach from Murdoch in the event he failed to get the Journal, Scardino said such an offer appeared unlikely. ”I don’t think that we are what he is after,” she said. – Guardian Unlimited Â