News Corp posted a 13% lift in revenue to $US2.72 billion for the December quarter, ahead of analyst expectations of around $US2.63 billion.
The company says the increase reflects growth in all revenue lines, primarily in real estate and advertising, as well as recent acquisitions.
Net income in the quarter was $US262 million, flat compared to $US261 million in the prior year. Net income in the first half rose 72% year-over-year
In the news media segment, advertising revenues increased $42 million, or 17%, compared to the prior year, driven by growth in digital advertising across the businesses due to improved yields and higher impressions, the recovery of print advertising at News UK.
Digital represented 34% of News Media segment revenue n the quarter, compared to 31% in the prior year, and was 32% of the combined revenues of the newspaper mastheads.
Closing digital subscribers at News Corp Australia as of the end of December were 909,000 (861,000 for news mastheads), compared to 779,000 (738,000 for news mastheads) in the previous year.
CEO Robert Thomson: “For the first half of fiscal year 2022, News Corp’s profitability reached nearly $1 billion, up 30% year-over-year, with the second quarter delivering record revenues and the highest profit of any quarter since the company was formed in 2013.
"Our businesses are thriving, particularly at the Digital Real Estate Services, Dow Jones and Book Publishing segments, and there was a pronounced surge in profitability at our News Media segment. Meanwhile, Foxtel’s streaming products flourished, with a 66 percent increase in total customers, and Kayo and BINGE both exceeding one million.
"We are delighted with our planned acquisitions of the OPIS and Base Chemicals businesses, which we expect will close in the first half of calendar 2022 and bolster the highly profitable Dow Jones Professional Information Business.
"The landmark agreements with Big Tech continued to benefit our journalism and our bottom line. In addition to the substantial deals with Google and Facebook, we expanded our multi-year global agreement with Apple, which is expected to be an important source of subscriptions and of advertising revenue for our news sites around the world.
"Our increasing momentum has given us the ability to make opportunistic acquisitions and further our $1 billion share buyback program. News Corp is clearly going from strength to strength.”
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