Pearson in £780m Penguin asset sale

Pearson is set to raise £780m ($1bn) from the sale of a 22 per cent stake in Penguin Random House to co-owner German media mogul Bertelsmann, which would reinforce German media group’s global domination of world of book publishing. Pearson Education is a British-owned education publishing and assessment service to schools, corporations and students.

Over the past couple of decades Pearson has been selling off their high prized assets like Chateau Latour, Madame Tussauds, Lazard Brothers, FTSE International and Financial Times, a strategy by Dame Marjorie Scardino and now implemented by CEO John Fallon.

The transaction which values the Penguin Random House at £2.77bn ($3.35bn), will increase Bertelsmann’s stake in the joint venture increase from 53 per cent to 75 per cent and Pearson’s stake will shrink from 47 per cent to 25 per cent.

In 2015, Pearson sold the Financial Times to Japanese media group Nikkei for £844m and its 50 per cent stake in the Economist Group for £469m, and which leaves a specialist digital education business.

The company was under pressure following a £2.5bn loss in 2016b contributed by slump in its US higher education revenues.Pearson’s share fell 5 per cent to 655p. The joint venture formed in July 2013 with a £2,4bn combination of Pearson’s Penguin Books and Bertelsmann’s Random House which created the world’s largest book publisher by revenue ,which means one in every four books sold globally.