For the top executives of Nikkei, Japan’s biggest media company, buying the Financial Times was a deal they had been chasing for years in a bid to turn a heavily domestic name into a global brand and survive the shift to digital journalism.

Founded in 1876, Nikkei has 3.12m subscribers, and has built itself into the most widely read financial publication for the country’s chief executives and salarymen.

The ￡844m deal came just four months after the Nikkei publication appointed a new chief executive, Naotoshi Okada. He has continued the strategy set by his predecessor Tsuneo Kita, who sought to strengthen Nikkei’s digital content with the launch of an online version of the paper in 2010 and investments in Monocle, the lifestyle magazine, and Evernote, a digital note-taking service based in Silicon Valley. Mr Kita remains chairman and chief executive of the larger Nikkei group.