Pearson Plc, the owner of the Financial Times, said yesterday that nine-month operating profit rose 20 per cent on higher demand for testing of business-school applicants and nurses and increased advertising revenue at the newspaper.
"Every part of the company is doing well," chief executive Marjorie Scardino said a statement.
"This increases our confidence that 2007 will be another year of record profits for Pearson."
The London-based company, which also owns the Penguin group, increased the full-year forecast for its professional education business, which provides testing for nurses, business-school students and stock brokers, for the second time this year.
The unit will report sales growth of 8-10 per cent in 2007, up from a previous estimate of 5-7 per cent.
Pearson is expanding the education business and has opened exam centres worldwide and acquired Xcitek LLC, a provider of stock market data, to boost its testing and finance businesses.
Pearson this year also bought the international education business of Harcourt Education, a publisher and testing company, and eCollege, a US online learning business.
"The market has been worried about the impact of a weakening US economy on education spending," UBS analysts Polo Tang and Alastair Reid said in a report to clients yesterday.
"We remain confident the education assets will be relatively resilient and the results today should reassure the market."
Pearson, which generates about two-thirds of its sales in the US, said all its businesses are in line with or ahead of the company's previous forecasts.
- (Bloomberg)
