Massive new London HQ, complete with ghosts
It’s stay up late time if you want to listen to Rupert Murdoch…
… News Corp has just reported a record year with net income siting pretty at $2.5 billion, but there’s still no higher bid for Sky. Now, Avatar didn’t half help, but this is Britain and all we care about are the newspapers. On a world wide basis The Sun, Times, Wall Street Journal and the Aussie titles managed $115 million profit in quarter four (to June 30), up 20 per cent, and on the year $530 million, up 16 per cent.
That’s because the recession is over you see, and in good old Britain the London based titles managed to improve profits in quarter four (we don’t get the figures conveniently, so the official word is only “higher”) driven by 15 per cent higher advertising revenues and lower paper costs. Given how hard the titles were hit by the downturn, the bounceback is not as good as it sounds, althoughthat compares well with the Daily Mail (up 13 per cent) and The Daily Mirror (up only 5.3 per cent) in the same periods.
Profits were up for the full year at News Corp’s Brit titles too, because of cost cutting. However, wearingly cover price revenues are still down because the public don’t buy the papers enough and The Sun keeps getting cheaper. And given how far profits collapsed last year at News Corp UK (from £107.3 million in 2007/8 on an operating basis to £27.3 million in 2008/9 ), you’d hope that a bit more cash would be rolling in the year to June 30 2010.
But if you think that any business can rebound now that the downturn is over, look at MySpace, which is always hardly mentioned in the company’s results releases. But the reference to “lower search and advertising revenues” and higher digital media losses are just another reminder of how far Facebook won.
No news yet on the Times/Sunday Times paywall, and not a lot more when the conference call kicks in, although the top man raves about the iPad as a “game changer in the presentation of news”. He also reckons he’ll get a decision on whether News can buy Sky from a regulatory point of view later this year, or rather would be “very disappointed” if it took longer, before rathering boringly saying he won’t buy any sports teams (killing off weird rumours of a bid for the Texas Rangers) and saying he “doesn’t mind” who is Australian Prime Minister. What’s that all about; is Mr Murdoch losing interest?
Mind you, so healthy are News Corp’s finances (revenues up 8 per cent at $32.8 billion) that there is little for him to worry about, even if there is no Avatar ever again.
