Now that the market has sold off some, time to buy some items performing well.
Recently we looked at News Corp (NWS) and noticed that unlike its various industries, both the Newspaper business lead by the Wall St. Journal was increasing paid subscriptions and the Cable TV dicision, lead by Fox News was both increasing share and advertising rates. This was one of the reason we were tempted to buy shares. At the tine, only the recent market surge prevented us from doing so.
Now this on Fox’s internet sites is but more good news for the company.
From MediaWeek.com
Fox News’ online ascent continues, as the network’s formerly lightly-trafficked Web site FoxNews.com has significantly improved its numbers for several key engagement scores over the past year as its audience has steadily climbed, according to newly-released data from Nielsen Online.
According to Nielsen, FoxNews.com’s audience ballooned by nearly 50 percent in April to 15.7 million uniques versus the 10.5 million reached during the same month in 2008. The site reaches over 18 million users when all of its sub-domain URLs are included (such as Fox News’ mobile site and FoxBusiness.com).
But even more eye-catching is overall increase in FoxNews.com¹s stickiness. For example, the site¹s total page views jumped by 75 percent in April, going from 382 million last year to 669 million this year.
That’s more page views than were recorded by category giant Yahoo News (which generated 614 million), despite reaching an audience less than half its size (Yahoo officials contend that the home page for Yahoo News does not automatically refresh its content, limiting the total number of page views it serves).
Furthermore, when examined on an individual site vs. site basis, FoxNews.com led all the major sites in Nielsen¹s News and Information category in time per person (an average of 39.9 minutes, just edging CNN.com) and pages per person (an average of 43, four more than the AOL News) in April.
It seems every division of the Fox franchise is running full speed ahead in a very difficult environment. As a potential investor, when you can see this (and the company is buying back shares), over $6B of cash on the books and a low stock price, the decision to buy or not becomes much easier. Look at it this way, the cash on the books is roughly $3 a share which means you are paying just $6 for all the assets and operations.
Shares closed at $9.91 Wednesday. any lower, not starting to buy might be impossible..
Disclosure (“none” means no position):None…will be buying soon
4 replies on “Another News Corp. Division Posts Impressive Results”
Todd,
Thanks for the good News Corp data.
Just a slight contention with your analysis in the second to last paragraph. While News Corp has “cash” representing $2-3 a share, shouldn’t you be taking the Company’s “net debt” position ($3.31 a share) into consideration when comparing how much you are paying for the rest of the assets?
Joe.
Harvard endowment just started buying as well.
“Harvard’s new purchases during the quarter include 1.47 million Class A shares of News Corp., the media company run by Rupert Murdoch”
anon,
ordinarily, yes BUT in this case, the vast majority of the debt does not come due for near 2 decades so it can be heavily discounted. off the top of my head, i think only 600K comes due in 2010.
For long-term debt, the company will be paying higher interest rates. $14bn of debt exists. Also don’t forget the TV stations in News Corp – which one can argue is going the way of newspapers. For a cheap cable network company, look at Viacom.