US investor Apollo mulls bid for education publisher Pearson

The investor said it was thinking about putting in a bid, but warned that it could withdraw its interest.

The education publisher is pivoting to digital textbooks (Chris Ison/PA) (PA Wire)

US-based investment firm Apollo has confirmed it is mulling a bid for education publishing giant Pearson.

The investor said that it was evaluating an offer, that would be made in cash, for the FTSE 100 listed company.

“Apollo Global Management, Inc and its subsidiaries, on behalf of certain of its affiliated funds, notes the recent market speculation in relation to Pearson and confirms that Apollo is in the preliminary stages of evaluating a possible cash offer by certain of Apollo’s affiliated funds for Pearson,” the investor said on Friday.

“There can be no certainty that any offer will be made, nor as to the terms on which any such offer might be made.”

Pearson said that it had been sent a highly conditional 800p per share takeover bid in November.

Earlier this week it was approached about a 854.2p per share bid, which values the company at a little under £6.5 billion.

Pearson said that the bid “significantly undervalued the company and its future prospects,” so rejected it.

The force behind thousands of university textbooks, Pearson has been on a slow but steady transformation of its business in recent years.

Paper textbooks are no longer where the business sees most of its future, instead it is in part reinventing itself as a Netflix-style subscription service for university books.

For 15 dollars a month – the service has not yet launched in the UK – students can access as many books as they want online through Pearson+.

It is a transformation led by Andy Bird, a former Disney executive who joined Pearson in 2020.

He also hopes to benefit from the post-Covid reality in the workforce, where staff want to retrain and learn new skills.

Last year the business reported a 33% jump in operating profit.

Shares jumped as much as 26% after Apollo came out of the shadows and spoke about the potential bid.

But shortly afterwards, they pared back some of those gains and were trading up 19%.

Pearson said: “The board is confident that the lifelong learning strategy set out in March 2021 will create sustainable, long-term value for Pearson stakeholders and that the results (for the 2021 financial year) demonstrated the building momentum as Pearson executes this new strategic vision.”