News Corp. Posts 1Q Profit on TV, Cable
biz.yahoo.com
Wednesday November 8, 7:05 pm ET
By Seth Sutel, AP Business Writer
Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. Posts 1st-Quarter Profit on Strong TV, Cable
NEW YORK (AP) -- News Corp. the global media conglomerate controlled by Rupert Murdoch, on Wednesday posted a first-quarter profit on better results from cable and broadcast TV compared with a year ago, when it had a big accounting charge.
News Corp., which owns the Twentieth Century Fox studio, Fox News Channel, the New York Post and MySpace, earned $843 million in the three months ended in September, versus a net loss of $433 million a year ago.
The results in the prior-year period were dragged down by a $1 billion charge to write down the value of its TV stations' broadcasting licenses. Excluding the charge, the year-ago earnings were $580 million.
The results were equivalent to 28 cents per Class A share, the most widely held class of News Corp. stock, versus a loss of 14 cents per share a year ago.
Revenue rose 4.1 percent to $5.91 billion from $5.68 billion in the same period a year ago.
Operating income fell 6.4 percent to $851 million as a steep decline in the often volatile earnings from News Corp.'s hit-driven film and TV business offset gains in broadcast and cable television networks.
New Corp.'s magazine and newspaper divisions turned in relatively flat earnings, while its HarperCollins book publishing unit had a 21 percent decline in earnings from a year ago.
On a conference call with analysts and reporters, News Corp.'s chief operating officer Peter Chernin said the company was continuing to look for additional features to "bolt on" to its burgeoning social networking site MySpace, but wasn't considering any major acquisitions.
Chernin said the company was in the "very, very early stages" of converting the large amount of online traffic at MySpace into revenue, noting that a deal with Google Inc. to integrate search technology into MySpace was just beginning.
"We have more page views than we know what to do with," Chernin said.
Also, News Corp.'s chief financial officer David Devoe said the company was moving closer to reaching a deal with John Malone, the head of Liberty Media Corp.
The two sides have been talking about swapping Liberty's 19 percent voting stake in News Corp. for one or more assets, possibly News Corp.'s 38 percent interest in the satellite TV broadcaster DirecTV Group Inc.
Chernin also said the company was carefully considering new ways to distribute Fox's large amount of video programming online and through other means, but he declined to go into detail. He downplayed suggestions that the company might go after video-sharing sites such as YouTube, which is in the process of being acquired by Google. |
