A Partnership Could Be in the Cards for Pearson and CNBC

With the close of the deal between News Corp and Dow Jones looming ahead, Pearson has taken the initiative to develop a partnership to strengthen The Financial Times, its competitor to Dow Jones’ Wall Street Journal. The top candidate appears to be CNBC, which is owned by NBC Universal (see article in DealBook). To find out if there could be any truth to this rumor, we created an IntellectSpace Knowledge Map that shows the common connections between Pearson and GE, the parent company of NBC Universal.

The first noteworthy relationship we uncovered is between Robin Freestone (Director and CFO of Pearson) and William Castel (Director of GE). The two are connected through Amersham, where Castel was CEO and Freestone was Group Financial Controller before the company was sold to GE in 2004. This connection as past senior executives of Amersham could have lead to talks of a partnership between Pearson and CNBC.

Another connection that could support the rumor is that shared between Patrick Cescau (Director of Pearson) and Carlos X. Gonzalez (Director of GE). Cescau is the Group Chief Executive of Unilever, where Gonzalez was a director until 2005. It is quite possible that the pair maintained contact since Gonzalez’s departure from Unilever, and have since conversed about the possibility of CNBC and Pearson joining forces.

GE’s CEO, Jeffrey R. Immelt, can also be linked to Pearson, further reinforcing the notion that Pearson could partner with CNBC. Along with Andrea Jung (Director of GE), Immelt is a board member of Catalyst, a non-profit organization. Reuben Mark (a Pearson director until 2006) is also a director at Catalyst, and these shared board memberships effectively link GE and Pearson. Although Mark is no longer with Pearson, he is probably still is in contact with current members of Pearson’s board, and still meets regularly with Immelt and Jung for Catalyst meeting, so he was likely asked to provide his input on the potential partnership.