News Corporation

Thank you for watching. The New York Post benefited from the triumph of the New York Knicks while our audience and reach in California continued to expand with the launch of an edition in San Francisco to complement the Los Angeles edition. And our editorial impact in the state and around the country under Keith Poole continued to burgeon. In Australia we celebrated the official launch of the News24 brand last month, replacing the traditional Sky News moniker. It was certainly more than a change in name only, as the new arrangement allows our team there to expand our editorial reach far beyond Australia's borders, where many of our presenters already have a significant profile and a resonant voice. We have already seen in recent days a tangible increase in audience reach. Thank you very much. The company cherishes its principles and traditions, but as is characteristic of our founding family, we will never be complacent. We are restless in the pursuit of principles and progress, and our teams have boundless energy and insatiable curiosity and creativity. In closing, I would like to pay sincere tribute to our teams around the world and express our collective gratitude to the shareholders who have been supportive on this auspicious journey. I must highlight the acute, astute leadership of our Chair, Lachlan Murdoch, and our august Board of Directors, who play a crucial role in assisting us to navigate with Naos, as does our Chairman Emeritus, Rupert Murdoch. And now, I cede to our Chief Financial Officer, Lavanya Chandrashekar, who will expound on our excellent results and propitious prospects.

Thank you, Robert, and good afternoon, everyone. Our fourth quarter full year results demonstrated the strength and resilience of our portfolio and the disciplined investment into our core growth engines. Fiscal 2026 marked another big step in the transformation of News Corp as we added new AI licensing revenues, accelerated the pace of product innovation, meaningfully improved profit margins and cash conversion, while stepping up our capital returns program. We took steps to streamline and simplify our structure, including most recently with the announcement of the divestitures of REA India and moving.com at realtor. We delivered record profitability in the fourth quarter, marking our 13th consecutive quarter of year-over-year total segment EBITDA growth on a continuing operations basis. Our focus on operational efficiency has driven meaningful margin expansion and we see substantial runway for further improvement. We have posted updated slides to the investor relations section of the News Corp website. The slides highlight how the company has been repositioned and transformed into a digital first company, with 61% of fiscal 2026 revenues now digital. We have delivered consistent total segment EBITDA growth underpinned by our core growth engines, including three consecutive years of mid-teens profit growth on a continuing operations basis. Importantly, we have accelerated the growth of free cash flow, which rose over 40% this year. While many analysts appreciate that Newscorp has a very valuable portfolio of assets, with which we certainly agree, we are also now delivering EBITDA and free cash flow growth at a faster rate than most companies in our peer group. We have demonstrated strong earnings and free cash flow power, built-in financial flexibility, and a clear focus on maximizing value. We believe our stock is materially undervalued and we will remain focused on levers to drive value. To that end, we made strong progress in returning value to our shareholders and have accelerated our share buyback program in fiscal 2026. In the fourth quarter, we repurchased $184 million in shares. The fiscal 2026 buyback was $643 million, which was over four times that of fiscal 2025 at $150 million. As a reminder, share repurchases in fiscal 2026 benefited from the approximately $380 million repayment of Foxtel shareholder loans. For today's discussions, I will focus on the quarterly results. Turning to the quarter. Revenues for the quarter were over $2.3 billion, up 11% year over year, and total segment EBITDA was $423 million, up 31%. Margins expanded by 280 basis points to 18.1%. This marked the highest fourth quarter profit on record, even when including contributions from Foxtel in prior year, and our fastest quarterly growth in four years. Our core growth engines, Dow Jones, digital real estate services, and book publishing, continued to generate outsized performance, and collectively, their segment EBITDA growth in the quarter was 30%, accelerating from the third quarter rate. On an adjusted basis, revenue increased 7% and total segment EBITDA grew 25%. Earnings from continuing operations were 33 cents per share compared to 9 cents in the prior year. Adjusted EPS were 35 cents, up from 19 cents. Turning to Dow Jones. Dow Jones continued to execute against the strategic and financial objectives we outlined at our investor briefing in March. On a full year basis, our B2B products and services accounted for more than 50% of segment profitability, underscoring the ongoing successful transformation of the business. We remain on track to achieve our goal of generating $1 billion in segment EBITDA by fiscal 30. As a reminder, a replay of the investor briefing, along with the accompanying presentation materials, is available in the investor relations section of the News Corp website. Fourth quarter was another record quarter with revenues of $644 million, growing 7% year over year. Digital revenues represented 84% of total segment revenue, up from 83% in the prior year. Professional information business revenue grew 5%, driven by risk and compliance, which increased 11% to $102 million, supported by customer growth, product expansion, and improved pricing. The reported growth rate reflects robust demand and the lapping of the Oxford, Analytica, and Dragonfly acquisitions last year. At Dow Jones Energy, revenues grew 4% to $76 million, with revenue growth impacted by the conflict in the Middle East and timing of new contracts. I want to emphasize what Robert said. The pipeline for new energy contracts is robust, and we expect improved growth in the first quarter. Customer retention remains very strong at approximately 90%. In the news business, circulation revenues grew 3%, while digital circulation increased 6% and improvement from the third quarter. As mentioned at the investor briefing, we are actively working to optimize yield, including raising the full price rate for the Wall Street Journal digital subscription to $44.99 for new customers from $39.99, Increasing the price of introductory offers and continuing the rollout of higher prices for tenured subscribers. While it's still very early, we continued to see benefits from these initiatives, delivering accelerated year-over-year growth in digital direct subscription ARPU and expect further improvements in fiscal 2027. Digital circulation represented 76% of total circulation revenue compared to 75% in the prior year. Digital-only subscriptions grew 9% year-over-year to nearly 6.3 million, with sequential net ads of approximately 194,000, driven by the growth of enterprise new subscriptions, marking the highest sequential ads in over two years. Advertising revenue increased 5% to $109 million, driven by 10% growth in digital advertising, which more than offset a 6% decline in print advertising. Growth was led by strong performance in the finance and technology categories. Digital advertising represented 69% of total advertising revenue, up 4 percentage points from the prior year. It's worth pointing out that Dow Jones posted its first full year of ad growth in four years and the start to fiscal 2027 has been encouraging. Dow Jones segment EBITDA for the quarter grew a healthy 20% to $181 million with margins increasing to 28.1% up 310 basis points. Turning to digital real estate. Segment revenues were $553 million, up 19% reported and 10% on an adjusted basis. Segment EBITDA was $222 million, up 46% reported and 33% on an adjusted basis, benefiting from strong profit contributions at both REA and at realtor.com. REA revenue grew 21% and 9% in constant currency. Growth was driven by the Australian residential business led by price increases, growth in add-on products, and strong listing growth. National new-buy listing in the quarter grew 11%, with Sydney and Melbourne both up 8%. Residential yields this quarter grew 11%. REA announced the sale of its Indian operations for an increased ownership stake in Aurum last month. From a Newscorp modeling perspective, in contrast to REA, we will not be treating REA India as a discontinued operation given its lack of materiality relative to Newscorp's total revenue and EBITDA. Please refer to REA's earnings release and their conference call for more details. Realtor.com continued to make very strong progress this quarter with revenues rising 13% to $167 million and the team remains focused on scaling profitably. Realtor has now grown revenues seven straight quarters and posted at least 10% growth for the past three, an impressive trend given the still challenging housing environment. Thank you for joining us. Additionally, our adjacencies, comprising new homes, rentals and cellars, continues to expand and represented 22% of revenue in the quarter. Lead volume rose 1% with average monthly users at 68 million, down 6%, which is reflective of both the broader market trends and the repositioning of consumer acquisitions to higher quality and higher value leads. Realtor.com continues to grow market share, driven by innovations to enhance consumer experience and industry-leading news and insights content. According to Comscore data, Realtor.com averaged 33% of total real estate portal visits in Q4, up from 31% in Q3, narrowing the gap to Zillow. This is nearly seven times the visit share of Homes.com, almost triple that of Redfin. On product innovation, recent initiatives include the launch of conversational search powered by Real Assist, expanded data-driven hyperlocal news and insights, and ongoing enhancement to the suite of agent tools. In addition, Realtor.com+, the company's recently launched platform for MLSs, continues to gain traction with growing adoption across the industry and very positive feedback from MLS partners. One statistic I provided last quarter which underscores yield improvement and a more diverse revenue base is revenue per existing home sales, which rose again by over 20% compared to Q4 fiscal 2022. This further strengthens our confidence in realtors' revenue upside and earnings power once the market recovers. Turning to book publishing. HarperCollins posted another strong quarter. Revenues grew 15% to $566 million, outperforming recent industry trends. Segment EBITDA was $57 million, up 14% year-over-year, and represents the highest fourth quarter segment EBITDA since fiscal 2018. Costs increased 15% this quarter driven by higher sales volume from a stronger front list, mix of titles and demand for higher priced deluxe editions. On an adjusted basis, revenue and EBITDA increased 13% and 12% respectively. These robust results were driven by strong demand for new releases in General Trade, UK and Children's combined with higher backlist sales. Digital revenues at HarperCollins grew 12%, including 16% in audiobooks, exiting with the highest quarterly growth rate this year, driven by strong growth at both Spotify and Audible. This quarter, the backlist contributed 60% of consumer revenues compared to 65% last year, driven by strength in the frontlist. At News Media, revenues increased 5% to $574 million driven by currency favorability, while adjusted revenues were essentially flat and included a modest benefit from the World Cup. Segment EBITDA was $24 million, down $4 million year-over-year, reflecting disciplined reinvestment support for the launch of the California Post. Finally, free cash flow, defined as cash from operations less capex, improved in fiscal 2026 to $811 million, up 42% year over year, and represented approximately 50% conversion from EBITDA. The strong growth was driven by increases in EBITDA and improvements to working capital, notably in the fourth quarter. Turning to our outlook, we continue to closely monitor events in the Middle East and the impact of the broader economy. That said, we are confident in the strength and resilience of our business. Some themes by segment. At Dow Jones, we expect continued strong revenue performance and anticipate B2B revenues, notably at Dow Jones Energy, to improve in the first quarter. We will continue to support this growth with disciplined reinvestment and expect continued margin expansion. At Digital Real Estate Services, Australian residential new-buy listings for July declined 2%. At Realtor, we hope to see continued revenue improvements, albeit the overall housing recovery could be impacted in the shorter term by rising mortgage rates. At book publishing, we expect to benefit from a strong front-list program and an easier comparison versus the prior year. At News Media, we expect to incur some incremental costs compared to the prior year related to the continued rollout of the California Post, but should also see some benefit from new content licensing revenues. Also note we face a particularly difficult prior year comparison in the first quarter. On free cash flow, we continue to be focused on driving strong free cash flow and as a reminder, our free cash flow generation tends to be second half weighted due to seasonality. With that, I'll turn it over to the operator for Q&A.

Thank you. We will now start the Q&A session. Please limit your questions to one per participant. If you have joined via the Zoom application, please use the raise hand functionality to ask a question. If you have joined via the audio line, please press star nine. Questions will be answered in the order they are received. We will now pause a moment to assemble the queue. Our first question comes from David Karnofsky with JP Morgan. Please unmute yourself to ask a question.

Hi, thank you. Robert, we've seen some reporting of publishers kind of broadly questioning their AI licensing agreements, given the impacts from traffic. And, you know, if we look at you over the last two years, you have the OpenAI agreement, you added another with Meta. And so I'm curious what you've observed so far that's given you confidence that these deals aren't a negative from an engagement or traffic standpoint. And then if I can ask one for Lavanya, we saw the repurchase of REA shares last in the quarter in addition to the News Corp shares. Maybe you could just speak to the strategy there. Thank you.

David, we obviously can't discuss the precise details of confidential AI agreements, but let me emphasize that there are significant deals in the pipeline, and these deals will be a mix of the horizontal with the large digital or AI players and deals with sector-specific verticals where our content is crucial for a new AI-based business, for example. We are working closely with OpenAI and Meta as partners Thank you very much. Our inputs are crucial components of their outputs. And as for litigation, it's far from over. But you can see from my earlier statement, we're focusing not just on companies that have scraped and stolen our content, but on their clients who knowingly or unknowingly have purchased stolen goods.

David, I'll take the second question that you had. I obviously cannot comment on REA's repurchases. but on our own repurchases, I mean, we did increase our repurchases by over four times to $643 million. And our objective is to continue to stay in the market and to maximize TSR. We have a great balance sheet, we have great cash flow, and you can track the number of shares that we buy back on a daily basis.

Thank you, David. Mariana, we'll take our next question, please.

Our next question comes from David Joyce with Seaport Research. Please unmute yourself to ask a question.

All right, I should be unmuted by now. A lot of great growth here. I was wondering about the book publishing side of things. What would you attribute such strong physical and digital growth towards? Obviously, you do have some new titles coming out Is there some secular trend that helps to explain it? And I was wondering what sort of data on usage that you're getting from your digital partners?

Well, David, I think the enduring trend is that we have a talented team at HarperCollins who are excellent at spotting new authors and in cultivating them and ensuring The products that are produced and published are of the highest quality and the highest originality. And as you've seen, we've experienced particularly rapid audio book growth in recent years. And our partnership with Spotify is leading to an expansion of premium audio, which including to family members. And that itself has prompted Audible to bring much more experimentation to audio books. And it's fair to say, by the way, that AI will certainly provide a role in helping bring books to life through the use of vivid voices and the ability to generate a compelling audio experience that makes the IP that much more valuable. For Q4, overall digital revenues rose 12% and audiobooks expanded 16%. When you think about it, AI can really transform audiobooks as there'll be so much more choice in the voices, the sound effects and other techniques and tools that will bring words to life. And don't forget how AI will enable much more cost-effective translations into multiple languages, both in text and audio.

Thank you, David. Mariana, we'll take our next question, please.

Our next question comes from Ailsa Le with UBS. Please unmute yourself to ask a question.

Hi, Robin, Lavanya. My question is with free cash flow ending on such a strong note, as you look into FY27, can you help us think about where you're prioritising incremental capex spend across the portfolio, please?

Sure, Elsa, thank you for your question. Again, just want to reiterate how pleased we are with the 42% increase in free cash flow for the year up to $811 million. I mean, what drove it was really a combination of EBITDA growth, obviously, which has been very strong as well as working capital improvements and we've seen those improvements on inventories and on days payable. We've only had a very modest increase in capex for the year which was just about 19 million dollars and that went towards supporting both investments in technology but also investments in upgrading our supply chain logistics for the Harper business which is posting great growth and which will come with its own efficiencies. You know, looking forward into fiscal 27, I would just say that free cash flow improvement remains a key focus for us and we do expect it to be a source of value expansion.

Thank you, Elsa. Mariana, we'll take our next question, please.

Our next question comes from Craig Huber with Huber Research. Please unmute and ask your question.

Hi there. I've got two questions if I could. One, on simplifying the company, Robert, is there any additional thoughts you can give us? These are obviously very strong numbers you guys posted here, but investors over the many, many years here have been just frustrated, as you know, with the complexity of the company. Is anything changing in your mind, in your board director's mind here in the last six plus months we might see some further simplifying of the company? That's my first question. And my other question I want to ask you is on the ad revenue front for Dow Jones and news media in the current quarter, how things are trending there. Is it any materially better or worse than you saw last quarter?

Thank you. Craig, thank you. Look, as you're well aware, as somebody who's familiar with the company, more familiar than most, we certainly have been simplifying with the sale of Foxtel, among other things, News America Marketing, and included a lot of focus at different times, for example, on a realtor, a bird. I would like to focus in fact on the emerging success of realty where revenues rose 13% marking the seventh consecutive quarter of growth and the third consecutive quarter of double digit growth despite a real estate market that's definitely in the doldrums. Every time the mortgage rate dips, even marginally, there's a surge in property activity and that's a logical response because A significant proportion of Americans are locked into low fixed interest rates, but they would actually like to move for work reasons or family reasons, for life choice reasons, for existential reasons. And we're poised to prosper when rates eventually do decline, even marginally. but we're also poised to see a significant change in valuation when the US market returns to near normalcy. So we do have obvious optionality when it comes to structure, but optionality means maximizing moments and maximizing value for our investors.

Craig, on your second question, I would just reiterate what we've said. I mean, as we've started at the end of July, We can say that we've had a particularly encouraging start for digital advertising in Dow Jones. But I'd also reiterate that ad revenue for us is not a very significant portion of our business. We are not, you know, we don't face quite the same kind of cyclical risks that a lot of other companies do.

Thank you, Craig.

Sorry, if I could just ask, I'm sorry, the realtor.com, if you can hear me, can you just explain a little bit further about this really strong 13% revenue growth there? I mean, it's been going on for several quarters you guys have talked about, and we can see on the outside, but what have you guys been doing differently at realtor.com to help explain that really strong growth there in this lousy market? Thank you.

Well, it's a tribute to Damien Eales and the team at Realtor, in particular in the way that the site has been developed. I mean, when people talk about moats in the AI age, moats is a strangely medieval concept. What Realtor has been creating is a chasm between itself and other companies. because of the way that they've been building proprietary IP that no AI engine can legally scrape. It's trusted truthful information that's crucial for customers. No buyer or seller or agent wants housing hallucinations. And that's why the visitors spend far more time and view more pages at Realtor than any other competitor, including Zillow or Redfin or homes.com. And these are Independent ComScore numbers, not home-brewed metrics. We have 5.5 visits per unique visitor, 1.5 times out of zero and almost three times out of homes. That underpins the success.

If I could just add, Robert, I think you've been investing in the brand and what we've really seen is the benefits of the innovations that have been launched, such as RealAssist, which is our latest conversational search product, I mean, you've heard me talk about this in the past, Greg, about the fly around feature. I mean, there's just a lot of really great innovation that has happened that keeps getting consumers to come back to the site and stay on the site.

Thank you, Greg. Thanks, Greg. Mariana, we'll take our next question, please.

As a reminder, if you would like to ask a question, please click on the raise hand button. Our next question comes from Encho Rakofsky with Evans and Partners. Please unmute and ask your question.

Hi, Robert. Hi, Lavanya. My question sort of touches on the AI licensing deals, and I appreciate that you're a little bit restricted in what you can say, but I think there's a lot of interest in the market. around those deals. So I guess to the extent you can talk about this, the Dow Jones and News Media, can you provide some colour around the margin profile of those deals? I mean, it's particularly stark that Dow Jones EBITDA margin was up over 300 basis points in the quarter. So is there any cost associated with those deals? Is that a key contributor to the Dow Jones margins? And I wonder if as part of that answer, can you confirm whether the Meta deal is which you announced in March is now contributing to the Q4 numbers or whether it starts ramping over the course of FY27. Thank you.

Obviously, I can't go into detail regarding confidential deals. These deals are important. There are more deals on the way. The Meta deal is now part of the business, not just at Dow Jones, but also for news media, as you'll see over successive quarters. And look, it's a tribute to Open AI and Meta that they have taken a principled approach in valuing our important content, our IP. But it's also true that there are more deals to come and hopefully not too much litigation because essentially those two companies have established benchmarks that other principled companies should follow.

I tried to add to that to just say that The Dow Jones business generates very healthy margins, and especially on the B2B side of the business, that's where we have our strongest margin. And as the mix of B2B increases, that's a driver of margins. But I'd also say that the team at Dow Jones have been extraordinarily disciplined in terms of how they've managed their costs. In the quarter, costs were up only 2%. On a full year basis, it tends to be closer to like around 4% to 5%. but it is that very disciplined reinvestment and cost management that also helps to contribute to margin growth.

Thank you, Encho. Thanks, Encho. Mariana, we will take our next question.

At this time, we have no further questions. I will now hand the call over to Michael Florin for closing remarks.

Great. Well, thank you, Mariana and thank you all for participating. Have a great day and we will talk to you soon. Take care.