Pearson (company)

Pearson is a British education company. One of the world's largest publishers of educational literature and programs, and also owns several commercial organizations for assessing knowledge and level of training in the USA, Great Britain and other countries. The main region of activity is the USA.

History

The founder of the company is considered to be Samuel Pearson, who in 1844 became a partner in a construction company based in Huddersfield. In 1856 his eldest son George joined the company and the company became S Pearson & Son. The company's specialization was the installation of water supply and sewerage systems. In the 1880s, Pearson expanded internationally (Egypt, USA, Canada, Mexico), where it built ports and railways and dug tunnels. Thanks to close relations with the Mexican dictator Porfirio Diaz, Mexico became the company's main region of activity; in addition to developing ports and building railways, Pearson acquired vast oil fields and began electrifying the country. The first acquisition in the publishing business was the London newspaper The Westminster Gazette in 1908, from which the publishing division Westminster Press Ltd was created. In 1917, the head of the company, Whitman Pearson, received the title Viscount Cowdray.

After World War II, some of Pearson's industrial enterprises were nationalized, leaving a controlling interest in the merchant bank Lazard Brothers & Co. among its many interests, a publishing house, an oil company in the USA and Canada, an investment fund and several enterprises producing porcelain, glass and other goods. In 1957, a large stake in Financial News Ltd., which owned the Financial Times and several other periodicals, was purchased. In 1968, Longman, a publishing house specializing in dictionaries and textbooks, was purchased, and in 1970, Penguin Books. In 1969, 20% of Pearson's shares went public. In 1963, Château Latour (one of the best wineries in Bordeaux) was acquired, Madame Tussauds was purchased in 1978, and in the same year the new entertainment division was expanded with the purchase of Warwick Castle.

In 1984 the company changed its name to Pearson plc. By this time the publishing division had become the most profitable and in the late 1980s was expanded by several acquisitions in the UK (Michael Joseph and Hamish Hamilton), USA (Viking Press and Addison-Wesley), the Netherlands (share in Elsevier), France (Les Echos). The largest acquisitions of the 1990s were the educational imprints of American publisher Simon & Schuster , for which Pearson paid $4.6 billion; these imprints were merged with Addison-Wesley and Longman to form the Pearson Education, which became the largest publisher of educational literature in the world. In 1989, the Château Latour was sold, in 1998 - Madame Tussauds, and the following year - a share in Lazard.

In 2000, Dorling Kindersley was purchased and merged with Penguin Books. In 2003, the UK's largest private examination board, Edexcel ^, was purchased , followed by the purchase of several more commercial examination and qualification boards in the UK and the USA. In 2007, the French newspaper Les Echos was sold to the LVMH group. In 2012, an agreement was reached with the German concern Bertelsmann to merge Penguin Books with its Random House publishing house into a new company, Penguin Random House (at first it was a joint venture, and since 2020 it is wholly owned by Bertelsmann). In 2015, the Financial Times was sold to the Japanese company Nikkei ; in the same year, a stake in The Economist magazine was sold. In 2022, the Romanian developer of applications for learning foreign languages ​​Mondly was acquired.