Fox, we’ve got good news and bad news — though your accountants probably already told you all about it.
Twenty-First Century Fox revealed its financials for the company’s third fiscal quarter of 2017 on Wednesday afternoon, reporting adjusted earnings per share (EPS) of 54 on $7.56 billion in revenue. The EPS figure topped Wall Street’s anticipated result by 6 cents per share, though the top line number fell shy of the expected $7.63 billion in revenue from a Yahoo Finance compilation, which aggregated the estimates of 25 media analysts. Adjustments over the recent 90-day period included costs associated with restructuring.
FOXA stock closed Wednesday’s normal trading day at $27.90 per share, down 33 cents per share. The mixed-bag of these Q3 earnings results immediately sent Fox stock slipping about 5 percent further.
Overall, Fox’s revenue rose 5 percent versus the comparable quarter last year — but the positive momentum is pretty much just from having Super Bowl LI. Thanks to the big game, Fox broadcast ad sales jumped 39 percent from Q3 2016.
There were other small-screen contributors and detractors: better TV ratings at Fox News and FS1 were hurt by lower returns from National Geographic channels.
Good and bad, those TV results were far better than the film stuff, which had a tough comparison to last year’s “Deadpool” box office fan frenzy. For the publicly-traded corporation’s Filmed Entertainment arm, the SVOD revenue for “The People v O.J. Simpson” helped offset a bit of those big-screen declines.
“We delivered a quarter marked by operational momentum and strong domestic affiliate fee growth,” Executive Chairmen Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch said in a media release. “We continue to demonstrate our ability to capture opportunities to grow distribution of our domestic portfolio of video brands, whether through established MVPD partners or new digital entrants such as Hulu’s recently launched live television service.”
“We made progress in the quarter against our key strategic priorities, exemplified by our creative successes across screens, from theatrical releases ‘Logan’ and ‘Hidden Figures’ to new FX debuts of ‘Legion,’ ‘Feud’ and ‘Taboo,’” they continued. “Our proposed combination with Sky, which was recently approved unconditionally by the European Commission, will advance another of our strategic priorities, driving innovation for customers.”
“We remain confident the proposed transaction will be approved by the end of the calendar year following a thorough review process,” the father-son team concluded.