| overview
holdings
landmarks
related:
Financial
Times
Recoletos
|
overview
This profile considers the Pearson publishing conglomerate.
It covers -
introduction
UK-based Pearson
is a book, newspaper, magazine, television production
and information services group.
It originated in the late 19th century as a civil engineering
contractor that became a conglomerate encompassing general
and financial publishers, merchant banking, Madame Tussauds
and Royal Doulton china.
As of late 2000 it had annual revenue of around £4 billion,
with an operating profit of £686 million. Most sales come
from the US. Pearson has around 30,000 employees based
in over 60 countries.
Pearson brands include Australian soap opera Neighbours,
children's character Peter Rabbit, leading UK business
paper the Financial Times (FT)
and Penguin books. In book publishing it is number one
in the UK, Australia, New Zealand and India and number
two in the US and Canada. It formerly had a 22% stake
in major European broadcaster RTL,
a Bertelsmann subsidiary.
shape
An indication of current holdings is here.
Pearson's corporate site is here.
evolution
Like Vivendi Universal, the Pearson Group began as
a civil engineering contractor.
The group dates from 1844. With the collapse of the 1860s
railway construction boom UK entrepreneur Weetman Pearson
moved overseas. By 1889 the family-owned S. Pearson &
Son was building the Hudson tunnel in New York; railways
in Spain, Mexico, Colombia and China; dams and canals
in Mexico and docks in Egypt and Canada.
In 1901 Pearson entered the Mexican oil business. Its
Mexican Eagle oil became the main rival of Standard Oil
in alliance with Royal Dutch Shell. Pearson became a peer
in 1910 as Lord Cowdray.
In 1919 S Pearson & Son became a holding company that
encompassed global civil engineering operations, oil extraction
and refining, property and the Whitehall Trust - a corporate
finance and investment house. It moved out of contracting
in the late twenties and early thirties.
Mexican Eagle was nationalised in the late thirties, resulting
in Evelyn Waugh's Robbery Under Law (1939), a commissioned
propaganda piece that is probably Waugh's worst book.
Pearson had dabbled in ownership of UK political journals
from the turn of the century (see Stephen Koss' superb
The Rise & Fall of the Political Press in Britain
(London: Hamish Hamilton 1984)), notably through ownership
of the Westminster Gazette. In 1920 the group acquired
a string of undistinguished but profitable provincial
newspapers such as the Brighton Evening Argus and
The Oxford Mail, organised as the Westminister
Press.
Pearson became a major investor in the London end of the
Lazard Brothers merchant bank and took stakes in the 1950s
version of dot-coms such as British Overseas Airways.
It gained control of the Financial Times (described
elsewhere in this profile)
in 1957, with a stake in the Economist, and later
bought book publishers Longman (1968) and Penguin (1971)
before going public in 1969.
After buying control of Chateau Latour in 1963 it grabbed
waxworks and theme park operator Madame Tussauds (1978),
the Royal Doulton ceramics group (merged with its Allied
English Potteries in 1972) and a diverse collection of
general interest magazines in the UK and US. In 1988 it
acquired the Les Echos publishing
group of France.
It became a major television producer in 1993 with the
acquisition of UK company Thames Television, spinning
off Royal Doulton into a separate company (worth £113.8m)
owned by Pearson shareholders. In 1995 it bought Australian
game show and soap opera producer Grundy Worldwide (whose
founder subsequently established the RG
Capital radio network), selling Westminster Press
for £305m in 1996.
In 1997 it added US producer All American Communications
and taking a significant stake in UK commercial TV broadcaster
Channel 5. In 1998 it bought Viacom's
Simon & Schuster education, business & professional and
reference divisions for £2.9bn and illustrated book publisher
Dorling Kindersley for $466 million.
1998-9 saw major deacquisitions. Tussaud's was sold for
$528 million in 1998. The group unloaded its stake in
Lazards for £425 million, also getting rid of its computer
games arm after a $405 million loss. Macmillan General
Reference USA was sold to IDG Books
Worldwide for £52 million, Macmillan Library Reference
USA to Thomson for £53m, Jossey-Bass
to John Wiley for $82 million,
medical publisher Appleton & Lange to McGraw-Hill for
$46 million, law and tax publishing operations to Thomson
for £70 million and Master Data Center to Information
Holdings for $33 million. It acquired E Source, a US supplier
of energy information, for £11 million, and LearningLab
in 2003
Pearson merged its Pearson TV production holdings with
the Bertelsmann-controlled
RTL broadcasting group: Bertelsmann
had an effective 67% of RLT and Pearson had 22%. In December
2001 Bertelsmann acquired Pearson's 22% in RTL.
Pearson sold its stake in Murdoch-controlled
UK satellite broadcaster BSkyB to Vivendi
for around £305 million and spent £1.7 billion on US educational
services group National Computer Systems.
Pearson's Spanish Recoletos
newspaper subsidiary was periodically on the market with
a valuation of about £1.3 billion. In December 2004 Pearson
announced agreement to sell Recoletos through an MBO.
In May 2007 Pearson announced that it was acquiring two
Harcourt units from Reed Elsevier for US$950 million.
The deal saw Pearson gain Harcourt Assessment, a Texas-based
exam-testing company, and Harcourt Education International,
a textbook publisher.
The same year saw Pearson sell Groupe
Les Echos, the French financial publisher (centred
on Les Echos but including online interests and
other imprints such as business magazine Enjeux)
to Bernard Arnault's LVMH. Les Echos generated €126
million in sales and €10 million in operating profit
for Pearson in 2006.
studies
Most studies of Pearson have centred on Weetman, with
a substantial academic literature about the impact or
alleged misbehaviour of Mexican Eagle (one of the more
unloved oil companies).
For general readers the three key works are Master
Builders: Thomas Brassey, Sir John Aird, Lord Cowdray,
Sir John Norton-Griffiths (London: Hutchinson 1963)
by Keith Middlemas, John Spender's overly-respectful 1930
Weetman Pearson, First Viscount Cowdray, 1856-1927
(New York: rpr Ayer 1997) and Desmond Young's Member
for Mexico – A Biography of Weetman Pearson, first Lord
Cowdray (London: Cassell 1966).
For Penguin see Penguin Special: the life and times
of Allen Lane (London: Viking 2005) by Jeremy Lewis.
Other works include Allen Lane, King Penguin (London:
Hutchinson 1980) by the founder's son in law John Morpurgo,
WE Williams' Allen Lane: A Personal Portrait (London:
Bodley Head 1973) and Penguin Portrait Allen Lane and
the Penguin Editors 1935-1970 (Harmondsworth, Penguin
1995) edited by Steve Hare. For Longman see Essays
in the History of Publishing in Celebration of the 250th
Anniversary of the House of Longman, 1724-1974 (London:
Longmans 1974) edited by Asa Briggs.
For Grundy see the separate profile
on this site and Australian Television & International
Mediascapes (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni Press 1996)
by Stuart Cunningham & Elizabeth Jacka.
Works on Tussaud's include Kate Berridge's Waxing
Mythical: The Life & Legend of Madame Tussaud (London:
John Murray 2006).
 next
page (Pearson holdings)
|
|
