News Corp., the home to The Wall Street Journal, New York Post, and publisher HarperCollins, reported on Thursday its profits more than doubled between July and September, which represents the company’s first fiscal quarter of 2025. The company pointed to strong Dow Jones subscription growth of 11% to 5.9 million customers, as well as a jump in Journal subscriptions of 7% to 4.3 million.
News Corp. also pointed to Dow Jones’ “robust performance in its professional information business” as a key revenue driver in Q1, with sales up 8% annually.
Here are the top-line results:
Net income: $144 million, a 148% increase from last year, when the company reported $58 million in profit.
Revenue: $2.58 billion, up 3% year-over-year. That narrowly beat an estimate of $2.56 billion from analysts from Zack’s Investment Research. News Corp. noted the $2.58 billion was a new first quarter record for the company. Sales were flat when compared to the previous quarter.
Earnings Per Share: Adjusted EPS were 21 cents, better than the 5 cents estimated by Zacks.
Subscriptions: Dow Jones subscriptions grew 11% year-over-year to 5.9 million from 5.2 million.
“The just-completed election has highlighted the importance of trusted journalism in a media maelstrom in which some journalists mistake virtue signaling for virtue,” CEO Robert Thomson said in a statement accompanying the company’s Q1 report.
On Thursday, Thomson also issued a strong rebuke against AI copyright infringers, noting in the earnings call that the recent lawsuit against Perplexity AI by Dow Jones and the New York Post claimed the startup illegally ripped off a “massive amount” of their reporting.
New Corp.’s latest earnings came on a day when several proxy firms — Institutional Shareholder Services, Glass Lewis, Egan-Jones, and Ownership Matters, an Australia-based company — backed activist investor Starboard Value LP’s non-binding proposal to change News Corp.’s voting structure. They’re calling on shareholders to back their proposal at the company’s annual meeting on Nov. 20.
The media company also announced that CFO Susan Panuccio would be stepping down at the end of the year, after eight years in the role. Panuccio, who said she’s leaving to spend more time with her family, will stay with News Corp. in an advisory role for the first half of 2025. Lavanya Chandrashekar, the former Diageo CFO, will succeed Panuccio in the role.
During the quarter, Wall Street Journal subscriptions increased 7% to 4.3 million customers. At the end of September, 3.8 million of those customers were paying for the digital-only subscription.
Artificial intelligence, as with many other earnings reports in 2024, was a key focus of News Corp.’s report. Thomson noted the company’s recent deal with OpenAI, which granted the tech company permission to display News Corp. content in response to chatbot questions.
“Artificial intelligence recycles informational infelicities and it is critical that journalistic inputs have integrity, which is why our partnership with OpenAI is so crucial and why we intend to sue AI companies abusing and misusing our trusted journalism,” Thomson said.
He added: “Dow Jones and the New York Post have started proceedings against the perplexing Perplexity, which is selling products based on our journalism, and we are diligently preparing for further action against other companies that
have ingested our archives and are synthesizing our intellectual property.”
On the earnings call, Thomson said News Corp. would prefer to “woo, rather than sue” AI companies moving forward.
News Corp.’s information business segment benefitted from a 16% year-over-year increase for Risk & Compliance revenue and an 11% sales boost for Dow Jones Energy. The company also pointed to a 22% uptick in annual revenue to $318 million from REA Group, an Australian real estate advertising firm.
The company’s leadership, as well as its dual-class share structure, have been criticized by Starboard recently. In September, Starboard took aim at Rupert Murdoch, arguing that the legal uncertainty surrounding the 93-year-old media mogul’s succession poses a risk to the stability and strategic direction of News Corp.
The Murdoch family currently holds an economic ownership of approximately 14% in News Corp. and controls 41% of its voting shares. At the company’s annual meeting last year, Murdoch transitioned to chairman emeritus and his eldest son, Lachlan Murdoch, became the sole chairman of News Corp.
The company’s stock price, which was flat from January through early May, has increased 19% in the past six months. Shares were trading at $29.16 when markets closed on Thursday.
And it’ll be worth watching how News Corp.’s stock performs in the months following the presidential election. In 2020, the company was trading at $13.31 per share the day before the election. By March 2021, the company’s stock was trading at more than $27 per share.
Lucas Manfredi contributed to this report.
