Murdoch's media group triples profits

 
Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation more than tripled its profits in the last quarter. The reasons for this were a strong TV business and a billion dollar profit from a share swap with competitor Liberty Media. On the bottom line, the media group with holdings all over the world earned 2.69 billion dollars in the first three months of the current year. Sales rose by 16 percent to 8.75 billion dollars, News Corp. announced on Wednesday evening in New York. The operating result increased by 16 percent to 1.4 billion dollars. 

In the financial quarter ended March, the Group benefited from a swap with its US competitor Liberty Media to the tune of 1.7 billion dollars alone. Murdoch gave up a 40 percent stake in the satellite TV operator DirecTV and received Liberty's 16 percent stake in his News Corporation in return. The TV division benefited greatly from the broadcast of the Super Bowl. The division increased its operating result by more than half to 419 million dollars and was the division with the highest turnover at 1.8 billion dollars (+15 percent). The cable network business with the news channel Fox News increased its profits by 17 percent to 330 million dollars. In the film division, however, sales and profits fell significantly after box office hits in the same quarter of the previous year. 

The huge empire of the 77-year-old Australian entrepreneur Keith Rupert Murdoch includes numerous TV channels, the Californian film studio Twentieth Century Fox, the online network MySpace, Jamba and, in recent months, the Wall Street Journal and a 23 percent stake in the German subscription channel Premiere.