Australia drags on News Corp

A 9 per cent decline in revenue from its Australian businesses dragged the second quarter results form News Corp down, with its Australian mastheads seeing a 6 per cent slump in income.

However, the global figures for the Murdoch business showed the business returned to the black in 2019, after taking a huge hit the prior year when it recorded a US$1.5bn loss.

Profit for the year stood at US$228m, on revenue that was up by 12 per cent, with its CEO Robert Thomson saying the company had ended the year 'robustly'.

In the quarter to December revenue for news and information services – which includes the media group's newspapers such as The Australian, the Herald Sun and the Daily Telegraph, as well as the Dow Jones newswire in the US, dropped by US$16m.

The company said the result was brought down by the Australian market, which dropped by 9 per cent. It said weakness in Australian print advertising was the primary reason for a 5 per cent drop in advertising sales. Its newspaper business in the UK suffered similar falls.