LONDON -- Pearson PLC, publisher of London's prestigious Financial Times newspaper, Monday said it agreed to buy Addison-Wesley Publishing Co., a Reading, Mass., publisher, for $105 a share, or $283 million.
Addison-Wesley, the sixth-largest college textbook publisher in the United States, has about 2.7 million common shares outstanding.
The agreement follows a December decision by Addison-Wesley to conduct a private auction of its assets. The auction ultimately involved seven interested parties, including U.S. and European companies, Pearson PLC said.
In Reading, Donald R. Hammonds, chairman and chief executive of Addison-Wesley, said, 'We feel that the interests of our employees, our customers, our authors, and our shareholders, all of whom have supported us in the past, will be extremely well served by our decision.'
In London, Lord Blakenham, chairman of Pearson, said, 'Addison-Wesley has long been indentified as an ideal merger partner and Monday's agreed offer will transform our subsidiary, Longman's, by adding a major U.S. educational and international publishing business.'
'I believe it's a substantial and fair price we paid,' said Blakenham. 'There aren't many acquisitions of this caliber that you can make in the publishing field in the United States which washtheir face and make a contribution to profits in the first year.'
Blakenham was referring to the fact that Pearson, scheduled to take ownership of Addison-Wesley in March, will not have to assume the traditional losses generally suffered by textbook publishers in the first quarter of the year.
In the first quarter of 1987 Addison-Wesley took a $10 million loss, however for the full year it earned $9.5 million on sales of $167.4 million.
A spokeswoman at Addison-Wesley said Pearson Inc., a unit of Pearson PLC, shortly would begin a tender offer for all of the textbook publisher's shares.
Addison-Wesley said it will merge into Longman Holdings, Pearson PLC's educational and professional book publishing unit.
The new company will be called Addison-Wesley Longman. Hammonds will serve as its executive deputy chairman.
Blakenham also revealed some results of Pearson's decision to begin printing the Financial Times in the United States 18 months ago.
The newspaper's U.S. sales have grown from 6,000 to 20,000 copies a day in the last eighteen months, Blakenham said. Advertising revenue, on an annual basis, has risen to $23.4 million from $7.2 million.
But Blakenham said Pearson does not intend to place the Financial Times in direction competition with the Wall Street Journal, the financial publication with the largest daily circulation in the United States.
