SPIRITS were high at the prestigious Imperial Hotel in Tokyo on July 24th as the top brass of Nikkei, Japan’s largest media company, gathered before local newspapermen to broadcast their purchase of the Financial Times. “I don’t have the skill to read it but I do gaze upon it,” declared Tsuneo Kita, Nikkei’s chairman. Many big, global names in journalism have at one time or another been outed as imminent buyers for the paper, but never that of Nikkei, which remains relatively unknown in the West. On July 23rd the FT Group’s current owner, Pearson, a British education and media conglomerate, said it would sell the paper to Nikkei for £844m ($1.3 billion). Nikkei narrowly beat Germany’s Axel Springer, a more diversified media group.
In kinder times for newspapers, Marjorie Scardino, a former chief executive of Pearson, said the FT would be sold “over my dead body”. For nearly 60 years the FT has added excitement to Pearson’s more stolid education businesses, and been a potent calling card in countries ready for business expansion, such as America, Brazil and China. The...Continue reading
Source :Business and finance http://ift.tt/1gSKgLZ
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