News Corp global profits fall 20% but Foxtel’s local revenues grow due to higher subscribers
News Corp today told the market that its global revenues continued to slide in the second quarter of the current financial year, with lower print advertising revenues in the company’s news and information services partially to blame.
The company, which locally publishes newspapers The Daily Telegraph, Herald Sun and The Australian and owns half of Foxtel, reported second quarter revenues of US$2.16bn – 4% down compared with the same time period the year prior.
The publishing company reported a second quarter total EBITDA profit of US$280m – 20% down on the US$352m from the year prior.
Robert Thomson, CEO News Corp
This is bleak news. The print business is dying and no matter how hard Thomson pushes it there is no evidence that digital is working for them. Foxtel might be gaining revenue but now it has competition and its costs are escalating. Like Fairfax the only bit with a pulse is property advertising.
I cannot see Foxtel continuing to grow subscribers. In fact I was surprised by this result. Unless, of course, the government gives in to Murdoch’s demands over sports rights. The product is pretty appalling these days compared to the ultra-cheap streaming services like Stan and Netflix. With Foxtel, the lowest package is $25 per month, which includes a bare minimum of channels and comes with a barrage of advertising, despite the monthly fee.
Totally agree with Numbers.
Foxtel are artificially inflating with Presto totals, and I would wager they will lose more customers than they think at the end of this year’s EPL season.
News will surely go the same way as Fairfax as started to – as programattic and online takes over spend even more from traditional ATL sources like print spreads, they will have to scale back their operations and get used to being a smaller operation.
Foxtel is by far the best platform in Australia. Has everything to watch. Current shows, all the sports anyone cares about, Foxtel go,, live and in HD. Netflix has nothing but old movies and one or two current shows that they have commissioned. If you want to watch what you want, when you want, Foxtel is the only way to go. And you can bundle it in with your broadband.
You can keep your cheap streaming services, you will need three or four of them to get what you want,and will be expensive if you want Premier league or NFL, or Mlb, or NBA
Wow Tkod I’m a foxtel fan…but seriously. If you aren’t a foxtel employee Ill eat my hat. Just do us a favour and declare it next time. Nothing wrong being a fan of the product but your comments scream “read from our media script”
What Foxtel need to be here is consistent. By all means add Presto subs into the overall picture to give a good increase to subscribers, but if you do that you need to report churn the same way. A reduction of 1.5% is a great result, however this almost certainly does not include SVOD churn numbers as we know they are much higher. Choose to include or exclude SVOD, don’t massage both stats.
@tkod – Love the sign off with the ever-growing list of sports that Foxtel doesn’t have. Sports people care about, but there are more: English Premier League (plus La Liga, and what all other football except A league, NFL, Australian International Cricket, Big Bash League, NBA, MLB…..plus a lot of the NRL games that people watch.
Foxtel’s sport offering has been eroded in recent years, so has their tv programming with the emergence of Stan and Netflix – which by the way are literally made for watching what you want, when you want it.
Foxtel need to take a serious look at their value proposition now – sure Go is great (when it works) and On Demand is OK (nowhere near as good as streaming), but they have some work to do – surely the most challenging time in their relatively comfy history.