Financial Times, IE Business School launch learning venture

By Jennifer Saba

Dec (Shanghai: 600875.SS - news) 10 (Reuters) - The Financial Times and Madrid's IE Business School launched a joint venture on Wednesday aimed at corporate executives looking to expand their education.

The program includes offline and online learning classes and courses that draw upon FT news and analysis. Several business schools across the world including the Yale School of Management and Antai Business School in China are taking part in the corporate learning program.

"It's a core FT audience - senior executives - and it's also connected to relevant areas of education," the FT's chief executive, John Ridding, said in an interview. "It's really to meet market demands for new and more effective forms of executive education."

In talking to corporate subscribers, Ridding said, it was found they wanted more in continuing education programs than just the "happy stories of success."

"Sometimes you learn from things that don't work out so well," he said.

The FT, which is owned by Pearson PLC (Xetra: 858266 - news) , has a corporate subscriber base of 300,000 users, up about 56 percent from 2013, and which includes two-thirds of the world's top business schools.

Online subscribers are up 23 percent to more than 485,000. The FT has a total paid audience of more than 700,000 subscribers. Last year, the company pulled in more money from content than from advertisers.

IE offers both an MBA program and executive MBAs, and it also offers dual-degree and programs with various schools around the world. IE and the FT will share revenues from the course subscriptions.

The alliance with IE Business is a way for the newspaper to broaden its revenue possibilities, especially as newspapers across the world suffer from declines in readership and advertising revenue.

Pearson makes more than 70 percent of its revenue from educational publishing and has been focusing more intently on the sector. There has been persistent speculation that Pearson could sell the FT, especially after the departure at the end of 2012 of chief executive Marjorie Scardino, who was a fierce defender of newspapers.

Ridding said that for the 26 years he has been with the FT there are always questions about Pearson's commitment to the news organization. "And always the answer is the FT fits very well with Pearson," he said, adding that the joint venture with IE Business was guided by "the interest of readers" rather than a corporate initiative. (Editing by Leslie Adler)