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.
“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.
Thomson also issued a strong rebuke against AI copyright infringers, noting 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.
On the company’s earnings call, the News Corp. CEO 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 the company to spend more time with her family, will stay with News Corp. in an advisory role for the first half of 2025, as she helps the new chief financial officer, Lavanya Chandrashekar, who is joining the company after serving as Diageo’s CFO for three years.
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 over 5.9 million; Dow Jones entered the quarter with 5.2 million subscribers.
Wall Street Journal subscriptions increased 7% from last year to 4.3 million customers; 3.8 million of those customers were paying for the digital-only subscription at the end of September.
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 company’s earnings call, Thomson said News Corp. would prefer to “woo, rather than sue” AI companies moving forward.
News Corp. pointed to Dow Jones’ “robust performance in its professional information business” as a key revenue driver in Q1, with sales up 8% annually. That includes a 16% year-over-year increase for Risk & Compliance revenue and an 11% sales boost for Dow Jones Energy. The company also gave a shout out to REA Group, an Australian real estate advertising firm, for its 22% annual revenue growth; REA Group brought in $318 million, driven by “robust Australian residential performance,” News Corp. said in its letter to shareholders.
The company’s leadership, as well as its dual-class share structure, have been criticized by activist investor Starboard Value LP 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, Rupert transitioned to Chairman Emeritus and his son, Lachlan Murdoch, became the sole Chair of News Corp.
On Thursday, several proxy firms — Institutional Shareholder Services, Glass Lewis, Egan-Jones, and Ownership Matters, an Australia-based company — backed Starboard’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 November 20.
The company’s stock price, which was flat from January through early May, has increased 19.41% 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 election. In 2020, the company was trading for $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.