Japan's Nikkei Buys the Financial Times Group From Pearson For $1.3B Thursday July 23,2015

 

Japanese media company Nikkei announced that it was the new owner of the 127-year-old paper, an institution in economic journalism and a prominent global brand.

Nikkei, which is privately held, is perhaps best known outside of Japan for publishing the Nikkei 225 stock average. But it is also the proprietor of Nihon Keizai Shimbun, the country’s largest business newspaper, with a print circulation of around three million and a paid online readership of more than 400,000

A man reads the front page of Japan’s Nikkei newspaper reporting Japanese media group Nikkei’s acquisition of the Financial Times from Britain’s Pearson at a train station in Tokyo, Japan, July 24, 2015.

The price was an eye-popping $1.3 billion, one of the biggest newspaper deals ever, dwarfing other recent sales. Two summers ago, The Washington Post sold for $250 million and The Boston Globe and its affiliated New England media assets sold for $70 million.

The deal does not include Pearson’s 50 percent stake in The Economist, nor does it include The Financial Times’s central London building, which Nikkei will rent from Pearson.

The price represents “a very good return for Pearson shareholders,” Pearson’s chief executive, John Fallon, said in a conference call for reporters on Thursday July 23,2015. Pearson’s shares were up by about 1 percent for the day.