News Corp plans to buy Pearson's Penguin Group for around $1.6 billion: report

Rupert Murdoch's News Corp plans to buy media conglomerate Pearson's Penguin Group, the Sunday Times yesterday reported without citing sources.

The paper said that News Corp, which owns book publisher HarperCollins, could offer to buy Penguin Group for around £1 billion ($1.6 billion), a deal which could torpedo the potential £2.4 billion merger talks between Penguin and Germany's Random House two of the world's biggest book publishers.

Pearson had last week confirmed that it was in talks with Random House, owned by German media giant Bertelsmann, but said the two had yet to hammer out a deal.

The moves comes less than two weeks after Pearson, the publisher of Penguin books and the Financial Times, acquired US online educational services company EmbanetCompass from an investor group led by Technology Crossover Ventures and Knowledge Universe, for $650 million in cash.

Under the potential Penguin-Random House merger, German multinational media corporation, Bertelsmann would own more than half of the newly-formed company.

But since the combined entity would have around a 27 per cent share of the UK's book publishing market and 25 per cent in the US, the deal could raise regulatory concerns on both sides of the Atlantic.