The story of News Corp in recent years has been a struggle to evolve from old media to new – from print to digital. Most obviously, that’s been seen in the online property classifieds business REA Group, where News holds a 62% stake. When we first upgraded News in 2013, that stake had a market value of $2.5 billion – about a quarter of News’s then market capitalisation of $10 billon. Now it’s worth $9.3 billon – around $16 per News Corp share, or 80% of the company’s $11.5 billion market cap.
The evolution has also been seen in books, where the higher margins from digital books has helped increase the EBITDA margin (earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation) from 10.4% in 2013 to 12.8%, thereby converting 3% annual revenue growth into a 6% annual EBITDA growth.
The shift to digital has been just as pronounced in what the company used to call its News and Information Services (NIS) division, but which this year has been split into Dow Jones and News Media, housing the company’s oldest, “printiest” media titles like The Australian and The Courier Mail in Australia, The Times and The Sun in the UK and the New York Post in the US.
Dow Jones, by contrast, comprises a string of assets better suited to the digital age, including The Wall Street Journal, Barron’s, MarketWatch and the eponymous Dow Jones professional information businesses.
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