Lefties rejoice? After all, this comes on the heels of the NYT earnings debacle, where their Boston Globe property value was slashed and the company lost $648 million for the fourth quarter.
Not so fast.
If you read further, you'll see that the quarterly profit declined only if you take into account a one-time sale that garnered a $381 million profit for News Corp. Without counting that sale, the earnings would have risen by 17%, thought the television unit still took a hit as a result of a failed launch of a mini network:
News Corp. earned $822 million in its fiscal second quarter ended Dec. 31, down from $1.08 billion in the same period a year ago, when it recorded a $381 million gain from the sale of an educational publishing unit.This is yet another example of making sure to read past the headlines on stories relating to company financials.
Excluding the gain, the year-ago earnings would have been $694 million. On that basis, earnings from continuing operations rose 18% in the latest quarter compared with a year ago.
Revenues rose 18% to $7.84 billion in the latest quarter.
The earnings were equivalent to 27 cents per share of the company's Class A non-voting stock, versus the 25 cents per share that analysts polled by Thomson Financial had been expecting. Net earnings in the year-ago period were 35 cents per share, or 22 cents without the one-time gain.
Earnings from its movie studio jumped 57% to $470 million on a strong slate including ''Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan'' as well a strong international earnings from ''The Devil Wears Prada.''
Television earnings stumbled, falling 39% to $112 million on lower earnings from the Fox broadcast network and losses related to the launch of MyNetworkTV, a mini-network on Fox stations.
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