Comcast may be open to spinning off its cable portfolio, but Fox Corporation is staying exactly the way it is. The company shot down the idea it could be interested segmenting during its earning call for the first quarter of fiscal year 2025.
“From my perspective, I don’t see how we could ever do that. Breaking apart the business would be very difficult, both from a cost point of view and promotional point of view,” Lachlan Murdoch, executive chairman and CEO of Fox Corporation, said on Monday. He went on to note that Fox drives a “tremendous amount of synergy across all of our platforms,” which include Fox News, the entertainment arm of the company, Fox Sports and Tubi.
Though he noted that he didn’t want to comment on the Comcast story, Murdoch said that he doesn’t think the potential spinoff plan affects Fox “in any way at all.”
Last Thursday, Comcast president Mike Cavanagh announced the potential development.
“Like many of our peers in media, we are experiencing the effects of the transition in our video businesses, and have been studying the best path forward for these assets,” Cavanagh said during the company’s third quarter earnings call. “To that end, we are now exploring whether creating a new well-capitalized company owned by our shareholders and comprised of our strong portfolio of cable networks would position them to take advantage of opportunities in the changing media landscape and create value for our shareholders. We are not ready to talk about any specifics yet, but we’ll be back to you as and when we reach firm conclusions.”
Cavanagh declined to comment on how a spinoff may impact revenue and emphasized that “there are a lot of questions to which we don’t have answers.” Comcast’s cable portfolio includes Oxygen True Crime, Bravo, MSNBC, CNBC, USA Network, E!, Syfy, Universal Kids and Spanish-language channel Universo. The spinoff would not include the company’s broadcast operations.
