February 5, 2008

Fox gives lift to News Corp. earnings

NEW YORK - Improved results from the Fox broadcast network and Fox News Channel lifted second-quarter earnings at News Corp., outweighing lighter returns from movies and TV production, the media conglomerate reported Monday.

News Corp., which bought Wall Street Journal publisher Dow Jones & Co. in December, earned $832 million in the final three months of 2007, up 1 percent from the $822 million it earned in the same period a year earlier.

News Corp.'s chief executive, Rupert Murdoch, told analysts and reporters on a conference call that the company was "definitely not" going to make a bid for Yahoo Inc. Last week Microsoft Corp. made an unsolicited bid for Yahoo that is now worth $41 billion, a rich price that others would have trouble matching.

Asked if News Corp. might be interested in acquiring AOL, another troubled Internet pioneer, should its parent company Time Warner Inc. decide to put it up for sale, Murdoch was even more emphatic: "That's an even easier question. No."

Murdoch said his team was focusing on building up Dow Jones' online properties and planned to make more material available for free on WSJ.com.

But he also said that much of the Journal's core business news coverage would remain behind a subscription wall. Murdoch had pondered opening up the site, which currently has about 1 million paying subscribers, but said in late January the pay wall would remain.

News Corp.'s profits for its second fiscal quarter were equivalent to 27 cents per Class A share, in line with estimates of analysts surveyed by Thomson Financial. Revenue rose 10 percent to $8.59 billion from $7.84 billion a year earlier.

Operating income from broadcast television more than doubled to $245 million from $112 million a year ago on improved ratings and ad pricing at the Fox network. At the same time, Fox's costs declined because of reduced coverage of Major League Baseball's postseason.

Earnings from cable networks rose 23 percent on higher earnings from Fox News Channel, which raised the rates it charges cable companies. Costs from the launch of a new business-themed cable channel partly offset those gains.

Profit from movie and TV production fell 14 percent to $403 million. The company provided relatively little detail about the decline, but said that TV production was less profitable due partly to the timing of new TV episodes.

Earnings from newspapers rose 15 percent to $196 million on advertising revenue growth, largely in Australia. Dow Jones' results are now part News Corp.'s broad newspaper division, which includes a large portfolio of newspapers in the United Kingdom, Australia and the New York Post.

News Corp. didn't break out the results from Dow Jones or any other section of its newspaper holdings. The new unit was on News Corp.'s books for just the last two weeks of the reporting period, giving little effect to the bottom line.

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