CHRISTINE OZDEN: The Middle East is a vast region geographically for us, with a great population, 320 million people, great market. A new and an old market all at once, with a lot of opportunities.

MEDENI MENEKSE: It is a very dynamic and very innovative market, but there are, of course, diversity in terms of certain geographical locations.

JARROD HINGSTON: For us, the main challenge is actually understanding the complexities within each country and being able to fulfil the needs to each specific country.

MEDENI MENEKSE: In order to meet the growing demand and the changing requests from each territory we thought we should have more local presence. And we go to each market and do our market research in that specific market, so that we can match the product, Pearson product, with the local requirement. Pearson Education caters to public schools, to all the international schools, the US curriculum, UK curriculum. And we also provide content for the private national schools.

CHRISTINE OZDEN: Edexcel is a fascinating business in the region. It has a very, very strong base in what I would call its traditional business area.

MARK ANDREWS: Our business splits in to two key areas, our academic business, which is our schools business, so we’d be working with international schools who deliver GCSEs, GCEs, IGCSEs, and that’s definitely a growing market for us. And the other side of the business is the professional education/vocational side of the business, which is our B-tech suite of qualifications. We’re working, aligning ourselves with government agendas, upskilling of our nationals, especially in the Gulf area. The scale’s absolutely huge, and the opportunity certainly goes above and beyond what we’re doing at the minute.

JARROD HINGSTON: The assessment within schools across the Middle East is seen as a very important part of education, probably more so than other parts of the world. Pearson is very well regarded as having a unique capability to assist governments in this area. With the Jordanian Ministry of Education Pearson Research and Assessment and Pearson VUE are developing a multi-lingual item bank which will support computer based testing in both Arabic and English. Currently, there’s no world class item bank available to facilitate Arabic testing, so this is a major requirement which we’ve identified in the region.

CHRISTINE OZDEN: The success of that project will be phenomenal in terms of how that can be used across the wider Middle East as well.

JARROD HINGSTON: But what it’s actually demonstrating more and more is that Pearson Research and Assessment, backed by Pearson is actually - has capabilities to deliver these large scale complex programmes more so than any other company or entity in the world.

SOPHIE PIQUEMAL: The Middle East is a hugely varied area from very affluent UAE, to very kind of low income Egypt/Jordan, for example. And what we sell there reflects that in that UAE is very much trade, publishing, whereas in Egypt and Lebanon tends to be much more academic, a bit more kind of schools publishing that we sell there. We do very well with kind of local area interest, I suppose, so things like Girls of Riyadh, and we’ve done really well with this Avi Shlaim: Lion of Jordan this year as well. And DK Publishing is phenomenal in the Middle East, and that’s a key area of growth for us.

ADRIAN CLARKE: I think in the Middle East the most exciting thing is it’s a period of dramatic growth, and suddenly we are doubling circulation, we are having people come up and want to subscribe to us. We’re increasing our retail copies, and we’re doing a bit of an experiment with the Middle East addition, having pages of local news on Tuesday and Thursday.

VICTORIA ROBSON: There’s a huge appetite for news in this region. It’s an emerging market, so there are an increasing number of listed companies, and that’s of real interest to international investors. This market is incredibly buoyant, there’s lots of liquidity here and growth, and therefore lots of funds being raised here to be invested elsewhere.

ANDRE SAWYER: We’ve built a fantastic reputation based on some of our coverage. We look at opportunities that are actionable to our readership, whereby our readership can generate business from those opportunities. And we’ve increased our yield year on year in the region through subscription revenue, which just goes to show you how value added our information is to our client base out in the Middle East, our reporters down there basically tap in to the investment flows that go in to the Middle East and actually exit the Middle East as well.

VICTORIA ROBSON: You need to be here on the ground to meet with contacts, to get a sense of the environment, to understand what’s going on. It’s a very contact based business environment where you need to get out and about and meet people.

MENENI MENEKSE:Belonging to greater global Pearson companies, per se, is a great advantage, because we can enjoy a huge diversity of products, and I don’t think there is another publisher that can actually match this.

CHRISTINE OZDEN: We are very, very excited. We’ve very, very ambitious growth plans. We’ve come together in Dubai, and I think that’s a representation of how the opportunities are for us to work together and grow the business together across all parts of Pearson.