BackInto Nikkei: From Japan to the world
A brief history of the Japan media group that purchased the Financial Times earlier this week
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New Delhi: Nikkei Inc. on Thursday purchased the UK-based media group—The Financial Times Group—from Pearson Plc for $1.3 billion in one of its largest acquisitions to date, a move that is likely to boost its already burgeoning newspaper publishing business.
Nikkei is the publisher of Japan’s largest business newspaper by the same name, with a circulation of approximately three million. The Nikkei Online Edition, launched in 2010, has more than 400,000 paid subscribers. It also publishes several other journals, such as The Nikkei Business Daily, The Nikkei MJ (marketing journal) and Nikkei Veritas (published every Sunday), focused on specific areas of the economy.
Though most of its publications are in Japanese, Nikkei expanded into the English language in 2013 with the launch of Nikkei Asian Review—an online and weekly print magazine with in-depth coverage of the Asian economy.
“In line with our push to become a truly global organization, Nikkei will step up hiring of foreign nationals. It is our belief that flexibility and diversity are key to producing original products and services. As such, we will continue innovating to create new value," Naotoshi Okada, president and chief executive, Nikkei Inc., says on the company’s website. Chairman Tsuneo Kita heads the 140-year-old firm which has interests in publishing, broadcasting and data services. As of December 2014, Nekkei has net sales of 170,413 million yen.
For the business people in Japan, Nikkei’s flagship Nihon Keizai Shimbun daily is a must-read. “ It enjoys a dominance among business readers, rare in any country, far outclassing the nation’s general-news dailies in its reach among top executives, although its circulation of about three million copies is lower than several other Japanese dailies," according to a news report in The Wall Street Journal.
But for all its dominance at home, the newspaper is relatively little-known abroad. Aware that few foreigners can read its flagship Japanese daily, Nikkei executives have long tried to spread the company’s influence to the english-speaking world, added the WSJ report.
“For years, the company had an english-language weekly newspaper focusing on Japan news, but it drew few readers. Nikkei closed the old weekly and started a new english-language weekly magazine in November 2013 called Nikkei Asian Review. The weekly has played down its Japanese origins and sought to be a regional publication covering a wide range of Asian events," said the report.
Nikkei is the latest in a string of Japanese firm driven to look overseas to escape poor growth prospects from a rapidly aging domestic population.
“Flush with abundant bank funds available at near-zero interest rates, and bolstered by stock markets at multi-year highs, Japan Inc is not short of capital to plough into overseas bids in search of profits that remain stubbornly hard to generate at home," stated a Reuters report about the Nikkei acquisition of the Financial Times.
Nekkei started in 1876 as the Chugai Bukka Shimpo (Domestic and Foreign Prices News) and is today is printed at 34 locations in Japan and overseas. In India, it has two bureaus—New Delhi and Mumbai.
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