Morning, everyone. We might make a start. I'm Kane Hannan, the firm's Australian TMT analyst. I'm pleased to be joined by Robert Thomson, the CEO of News Corp. Robert, thank you for joining us again this year.
Thank you, Kane. Thank you all for getting up early.
Robert, maybe as a starting point, I was interested if we could talk about how you're seeing the macro environment and how it's differing across the U.S., U.K., Australian markets. So how you're positioning News Corp to capitalize on this for the year ahead?
Yeah, obviously, the contours of the economies vary by country. The U.S. is a different stage of the cycle, Australia, the U.K., which are our three biggest markets. Japan, quite a big market for us as well, but particularly for Dow Jones and HarperCollins. They're just starting to get inflation for the first time in over three decades. And as a company, we have to respond intelligently to the different circumstances and take advantage, as you suggest, of the opportunities. I mean, for us, it frankly has been a challenging year in the sense that we about 60% of our revenues are international.
So foreign exchange, inflation and interest rates, and clearly, inflation and interest rates are linked to each other, but they've had a genuine impact on the way we've done business and have to do business. And some of those circumstances are changing, as I say, different stages of economic cycle in different places. But when you look at the potential impact of those consequences and circumstances, so, for example, inflation has been particularly hard on any production business, so books, transport, raw materials, and you saw that in the HarperCollins numbers. Forex clearly, obviously affects our international earnings and back in U.S. dollars. And so added together, that was quite a challenge.
And yet in the fourth quarter, our EBITDA was up 8% year-on-year, and the year before overall was a record year. And so, you saw that we had the real responses to genuine challenges. I think, when you look ahead a little bit, as soon as the seemingly plateauing interest rates in the U.S. actually do plateau and slightly descend, the mortgage rate will come down. The 30-year mortgage rate at 7.3% is a real challenge for most Americans. And people are having to make two decisions, one, about the price of a house, and two, about the price of a mortgage, which was not the case four years ago.
So Realtor will definitely benefit from that, and obviously, advertising related to the housing industry for many of our media platforms will benefit from that. And the inflation challenge has started to abate, for example, at HarperCollins, and we said that Q4 margins were not acceptable, that we're seeing harbingers of improvement in this quarter, and that is certainly the case. You have to wait until we announce, obviously, but-
Mm.
There's no doubt that the trend has changed there. And then overall, when you look at, say, for example, margins, which you have to focus on all the time, but particularly at a time of challenge, in Q4, the Dow Jones margin was 24.4%, compared to 18.8% in the previous year. So real growth. And overall, in a challenging year, our margin was 14%, compared to 11.8% in the previous year. So, there's no doubt it was a challenging environment, but our ability to have navigated that gives us real confidence for our ability to take advantage of gradually more auspicious circumstances.
Yeah. Maybe, excuse me, continuing on the margin point, you also did have the right sizing of the business earlier in the year. So it's just how are you thinking about that now, you know, given some of those macro comments? I mean, are we at the right size that News needs to be and potentially some incremental investment? Or, you know, is there further optimizing that needs to be done over time?
Yeah, I think you have to, kaizen, continuous improvement concept from—inherited from Japan. It, it's real, and it has to be real. And so these moments of deeper introspection about, your cost base and, ultimately allocation of resource, should be a catalyst for, further thought. I think our... We announced, you know, on average, we're going to reduce about 5% of the workforce. We thought we would save around $135 million. We have actually annualized, being able to save north of 160 million, well, north of that. And but what we've learned along the way is that, there were some inefficiencies, and you have to, emancipate efficiency, not, embed inefficiency.
I think we've learned from that process the areas we need to focus on more to frankly further cut costs, but also to ensure that we have the resource to make the most of our assets more generally. And where we have a comparative advantage is that we're able to compare. So we have similar businesses in three countries. We have the largest digital property business in India. And so we're able to make direct comparisons between and among those businesses to identify inefficiencies in the way that things may be done, and also, obviously, to highlight the positives and take advantage of those and redeploy those learnings. And so that was definitely one of the lessons of the most recent cost cutting.
Now, everybody would rather hire than fire, but longer term, if you're not maximizing the use of your resource, you're negligent to investors.
Yeah. Then the other topic everyone's obviously been talking about at this conference around AI. You have been very vocal on the issue. I mean, you spoke at a recent call about-
Actually, I'm just getting started on AI, so
Hoping to set precedent to benefit content creators. Maybe just elaborate on those comments a little bit more and talk about how you see the threats and opportunities of AI, and I suppose, yeah, effectively, how you guys are responding to it.
Yeah. Okay, look, it's a big issue. It's... It will affect every bit of most companies, whether it be customer service, whether it be subscription management, whether it be how you create code. I mean, so it can't be the preserve of the techies, culturally, in any company. It has to be something embraced by everyone and because they know best about their specialty, and so you need to have a confluence of the tech insight and the functional expertise. So there's that, and that's true of our company, and frankly, should be true of every company.
And then, as a content creation company that has valuable IP, there's what I refer to as a particularly for our News content and our HarperCollins archive content, there are three areas in which the clearly there's a duty of care owed to us, i.e., you need to pay us. One is the generated by our engines are training on archived material and extracting benefit from that. Two, they're surfacing specific headlines. And three, they're also extracting editorial essence and repurposing it and deriving value from that. Well, they're deriving value from our creation and so that there will be a big debate around that.
It'll be, and that debate will play out in two ways: one, what's the value of the archive, and two, how much do you value updates? Because people, I think, forget that, AI generated by AI, is essentially retrospective. It's the perpetuation of permutations and instinctive, linear, not lateral, recomposition of content. That's what it is, right? It's the recomposition, in many cases, of our content. And so if you derive benefit from our content, we should derive a benefit, or else you're in danger of undermining the creation of that content. And when you look at the dramatic decline in a newsroom employment in the U.S. from 2008 to 2020, it's down around 57% or more, depending on how you calculate it.
And, you know, that shows you that the first wave of digital destruction has been profound and that we're in a position where there's an even more damaging wave looming. Then apart from our direct concerns, there's another tech triptych, which will become clearer to people over time, which involves first of all the IP overall, it involves antitrust, and it involves bias, including political bias, and essentially mistaken content. Because, you know, is now, what does AI actually stand for? Does it stand for acute insight? Does it stand for amusing incoherence? Does it stand for the affidavit initiation, i.e., the beginning of legal action?
So what you will see over time is a lot of litigation. Some media companies have already begun those discussions. Personally, we're not interested in that at this stage. We're much more interested in negotiation. We have various negotiations going on. We'd prefer to reward the journalists, not the lawyers, who are the inevitable beneficiaries. But there will be, for political reasons, obviously enough, that third element I mentioned about inaccurate, biased content. I mean, we're clearly doing a lot of tracking of the use of AI in our content, and we... And there are certain AI engines that are churning out content, apparent news, factual content, which is off the political spectrum, which would essentially make Marx and Lenin persona non grata. It's that left wing.
And so, how these things play out, particularly in an election year, these are going to be big issues, and I don't think the scale of the importance of the issue is yet understood. We can see it, and we're, you know, clearly we're making overtures to different people at different times about, you know, "Have you seen what your engine is, shall I say, spewing out?" And I think even the more thoughtful, principled leaders of companies involved in this sector are starting to be concerned about what has been programmed. And don't forget, look, it's rubbish in, rubbish out, rubbish all about, particularly with AI. And but the rubbish, the inputs, may themselves be fundamentally flawed.
But don't forget, you're also seeing the effects, sometimes pernicious, of the bias of the inputter. These AI engines are a combination of the input and the inputter. And again, so the idea that it's some kind of abstract black box that I don't know how on earth this stuff comes out, that's not an answer, because basically it's untrue.
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. A lot to think about. Last sort of high-level question before we drill into some of the segments. You know, there has been obviously a lot of developments in the, the News portfolio through the year, you know, whether that was the potential Fox merger, the Move sale discussions. You guys obviously have a very healthy balance sheet and obviously the Foxtel sort of refinancing underway. Let's talk about how your desire to continue reshaping the portfolio from here. Is it right to think that maybe Dow Jones is, is the greatest area of focus for, for News going forward?
Well, we've identified three pillars of growth and have done for a few years, which obviously is Dow Jones, book publishing, and digital real estate. It's clear that even in a difficult year, they're core to our success. With digital real estate and books, we would like to think that there's imminent upside. You're already seeing, for example, in the Australian property market, some more buoyancy than there was, say, 12 months ago. It'll take a little longer here in the U.S.
But the investments that we've made, for example, in books with the acquisition of Houghton Mifflin, Dow Jones, the acquisition of both OPIS and CMA, which are, you know, already great acquisitions, and you're seeing, obviously, their impact in the EBITDA margins of Dow Jones. B2B business is more profitable than B2C business. And over time, within Dow Jones, that. And this year, in fact, we should see the crossing of the lines where B2B becomes the more significant segment. So we're absolutely focused on that. But that doesn't mean that, for example, whether it be Foxtel or any of the other News Media businesses, that they don't have a role because there's an inherent complementarity in those businesses. The News Media business has helped us build Foxtel.
Foxtel has helped us build the news Media business. But what we do have, one, is optionality, and two, we have continuous introspection about what is the right shape of the company, what should we look like in the future, and in the end, to maximize the return on our investments for our investors.
Yeah. Maybe focusing on Dow Jones then, as you said, obviously, B2B crossing that line and being a bigger contributor to, to earnings than the B2C business. Just talk about how you see those two businesses within Dow Jones playing out in the years ahead. You know, is there a target, I suppose, how high B2B will get to? And just broadly, you know, the, the drivers of growth on the next three-five years?
The target is higher. Higher, much higher. That's the target. It's hard to be specific, obviously, Kane. But you know, just on those three pillars, in a difficult year for digital real estate and books, they accounted for 57% of our revenue last fiscal and 75% of our EBITDA. So that gives you a little bit of a sense in a tough year, how important they are, and clearly a lot. They throw off a lot of cash. For Dow Jones, the PIB revenues last year were up 31%. And what we've seen, for example, is Risk and Compliance since the split, revenues have grown sixfold. We've seen quarter after quarter, year-on-year, double-digit increases, and we announce it every quarter, and you can see it every quarter.
And you can see the impact not only on Dow Jones, but actually on the News Corp balance sheet. And we expect, we have high expectations for both OPIS and CMA that a similar pattern will emerge. We'll be disappointed if it's not quarter after quarter, year- after- year, double-digit growth in revenue-
Mm-hmm.
High margin revenue. And so, we continue to look for opportunities. We're very fortunate with the acquisition of OPIS and CMA in sometimes frothy markets. Those were disposals necessitated for regulatory reasons, and we were able to take advantage of that. So very reasonable price for a very productive asset.
Yeah. And you had accelerating digital subscriber growth, you know, through the year. If we go back to the Dow Jones Investor Day, I think we were talking about targets for around seven-eight million, you know, over time. Talk about how you're balancing subscriber growth, you know, versus ARPU in that business, you know, whether those seven-eight million targets are still how we think about, you know, I suppose, that business over time and its target.
Yeah, look, depending on what your time frame is, it should, frankly, be a higher number than that over a period. We saw digital subs at Dow Jones increase 12% last year. And interestingly, international subs up 14%. International is only 12% of the subscription base at the moment, and we do see it as an opportunity. And both Almar, the CEO, and Emma, the new editor-in-chief at The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones, are very international by nature. They have a lot of experience in between them in Asia and Europe. So clearly, we see an opportunity for an initiative for a very attractive global cohort.
And that's a demographic that's valuable, not only in circulation terms, but in advertising terms. And so over a period, through initiatives that we're taking here with the bundling strategy, which obviously in the shorter term can mean that there are discounts on Barron's or whatever, but at the same time, we all know that in any subscription business, there are two challenges: one, acquisition, and two, churn reduction. And so over a period, the team fully expects that the churn rate will come down, the ARPU will go up, because of the initiative that they've taken at this time in bundling. So there'll be a phasing impact over time, but they're very clear about the fundamental strategy.
Mm-hmm. And that 12% of subscribers outside the U.S., you know, for The Wall Street Journal, talk about some of the strategies, I suppose, to grow that internationally. And if I think about an international subscriber, I mean, are they as valuable to the WSJ as, as a domestic? Do you think they have the same willingness to pay?
Yeah, it's a really thoughtful question. It clearly depends on how you're targeting, who you partner with. For example, in Japan, we have a great partnership with the Mainichi Group. They understand the audience well. In some ways, they understand the audience better than we do. They know what the target demographic is, and so, with their help, we are launching a fresh initiative there. In France, we have a small stake in a paper called L'Opinion, which was started by the estimable Nicolas Beytout. He is a cornerstone of our subscription strategy there. Obviously, in the U.K., we have great assets that we can leverage and will do.
You have to make sure that you are targeting legitimate customers, and it's, frankly, that your offers are not churn bait. We're very conscious of that. Partly, it's the lessons we've learned in the U.S. that will inform the strategy, but also understanding what are the right demographic cohorts to target. Because it can't, in any way, be an exercise in ego extension. It has to be an exercise in product extension.
Yeah. So obviously, it's a much smaller part of the business, but just the advertising market that we're in, you know, both for Dow Jones and News Media, is there any comments you can make or observations you can make around the ad markets? You know, if there's any green shoots starting to emerge, just how you're seeing ad markets tracking?
Yeah, I prefer blossoming flowers to green shoots, but it really is hard to be a soothsayer in a market that has been somewhat volatile. You're starting to see in this country, the return of finance and tech advertising, which is obviously great for Dow Jones, for-
Mm
... for MarketWatch. And in Australia, clearly, with the end of COVID, you saw an explosion in travel-related advertising, particularly external travel. So we're still seeing the playing out really of trends that are either what you might call consequences of long COVID in an economic sense or readjustments to, for example, a changed interest rate environment. And so overall, we're seeing improved trends, but it would be foolhardy to say we're gonna see double-digit growth in Q2 or whatever, 'cause we just don't have that level of visibility. And the other thing that, given that you have a changing market where, you know, actually opportunities are fluctuating...
So for example, we notice now that airlines are starting, at least outside Australia, airlines are starting to put on more flights, for example, into the U.S. The aviation market is starting to be a rich source, and sometimes that's a national market, and sometimes, for example, it's a New York market or a California market. And having the ad teams attuned to the ebb and flow of those trends is as important as the trend itself.
Yeah. Yeah. If we think about digital real estate, maybe Move specifically, and Damian coming in as CEO, obviously fiercely competitive, focused on regaining share in what's, you know, a tough and improving macro environment. I mean, how do I think about what that could mean for Move's earnings contributions in the near term? I mean, would you have the appetite for things to go negative, you know, if there was confidence in, in, you know, really retaking some market share?
Well, our strategy now, and Damian is a very aggressive competitor, a principled, aggressive competitor, and I think you'll see the fruits of his toil fairly promptly, actually. What he absolutely has, and this is, you know, I must pay tribute as well to David Doctorow, his predecessor. David made some very savvy acquisitions, which have given us a platform for the future. Damian's background in the company means that he's able to do in the U.S. what we were able to do with REA in Australia, which is take advantage, full advantage of our platforms to build the business in a way that, frankly, other competitors don't have the advantage of. And the...
It was actually Lachlan Murdoch's initial insight when he made that extraordinary investment in REA at what is now an unbelievable multiple. I mean, one of the really, one of the great investments, not only in Australia commercial history, but globally, that he would take advantage of those platforms. I mean, it benefited both. It clearly is to the benefit of The Wall Street Journal in terms of subscription targeting to have great insight into certain zip codes. It's clearly a benefit to Realtor to have the advantage of inventory and, you know, prominent placement on WSJ.com, MarketWatch, Barron's, our other sites.
There's a wonderful emerging relationship between Damian and Sean Giancola, the CEO of the New York Post, and who can immediately see the benefits to the Post of that developing relationship. And even in the last couple of months, there have been one billion impressions for Realtor on our various sites. Now, quantity of impression is one thing, the quality of impression is what we're working on now, to make sure that each of those impressions is beneficial to the business, to both businesses, ultimately. And so we don't have to talk about going negative. What we have to be positive about is taking advantage of those assets.
So the main, I suppose, Damian's main change that he'll bring is utilizing the News Corp assets more than, say, pivoting out of any of the, you know, the adjacent markets that you've been focusing in, or any, I suppose, bigger strategic changes?
Well, I would say it is of itself a big strategic change because it's a sensibility change, and you will definitely see the benefits of it in coming quarters. And what we're also doing is preparing to take advantage of the inevitable changing of the tide in the market itself. Because when you look at existing home sales, they're obviously at a very low level, historically low level. We all know why that is. You know, at a time of relatively high employment, very low unemployment, at a time of wage growth, at a time where many people still have significant savings, you would expect there to be more activity in the housing market. The problem is pure and simple, is the mortgage rate.
Mm.
I would just... What you will see for housing generally, as that mortgage rate goes down, opportunity in the property sector goes up.
If we think about Foxtel, you know, you're entering the third year of the three-year strategy that, that we spoke about a number of years ago. Are things broadly tracking, you know, in line with those targets, you know, from a financial perspective? Just interested to get your take on, I suppose, Foxtel, where it's at in its evolution. You know, do you still see a big subscriber penetration story ahead, or is it more around driving yield per subscriber? And then maybe just worth touching on, I suppose, the aggregation strategy and then what that would mean, you know, for, for the, you know, for your financial aspirations over time.
Yeah, well, look, Foxtel is a transformation story, and Siobhan, Patrick, and the team deserve a huge amount of credit. Anyone at one of these conferences a few years ago would have been aware that we were being asked: How much more money do you have to put into Foxtel? It's all public, the amount of loans, the amount of investment, extra investment we made. The question that we should be asked is how much are we gonna take out of Foxtel? So we have real optionality there, and it is basically because we have made the transition into streaming in a way that's very different to the U.S. market. I mean, obviously, you have the Charter, Disney contretemps here right now.
But that, that's not gonna happen in Australia because we have both the best sports service and the brilliant platform for delivering them with multiple means of delivery. So it's not a contradiction. It's not... There's an inherent contradiction in this market. There's not such a contradiction in Australia. And you see that even though our streaming services continue to gain in market share and overall numbers, that actually the broadcast churn rate has come down significantly from about 14% down to, I think, 11.8% in the most recent quarter.
And so it shows you that the sort of questions, and rightly, that were being raised, the concerns that investors had, "Well, if you go to streaming, does that mean, you know, the ultimate demise of broadcast?" Those questions have been answered in a very eloquently by our strategy there. The key over time is, and it's the same as the WSJ subscription strategy, acquisition and retention. And people learnt how to stream, and they've learnt how to churn, right?
Mm.
You have to give them every reason not to churn. For example, with Kayo, the sports service, when you come out of the big winter sports, what is your strategy for making sure that October and November are not churn months? That's where the teams have done a lot of work in the last couple of years, a lot of learnings, and that's something that is controllable. How we take advantage of what has now the accumulated intelligence and expertise should be reflected in those numbers.
Mm. And if I think about the comments around churn and then trying to manage churn, I mean, how do I think about, I suppose, the price rises that went through, what impact they might have had on churn? And I suppose you're learning around, you know, the pricing power of these streaming services that have from here.
What we learned is that both Kayo and Binge are value for money, because the response was not a sudden mass migration away from the products. And they are value for money. When you look at what you get from Kayo, which is again, it's very different to the sports offerings here. ESPN wishes it was Kayo in its dreams, and 'cause you have such a complete offering of the key Australian sports, the rugby league, Aussie Rules, cricket, and, you know, many and varied other sports in a complete package. And it's not just the sport, it's the way the team presents the sports, and it's clearly superior to the terrestrial product.
People can see and feel the difference, and that difference is of itself valuable.
Mm-hmm. And lastly, book publishing. You touched on that initially in terms of, you know, the Q4 performance and then some of the trends changing, you know, earlier this year. What are you seeing, I suppose, in terms of consumer demand impacting that industry? And how do I tie that up, I suppose, with, you know, the frontlist titles that you've got in the market? You know, I suppose some easier comps without the Amazon issues coming through in the first half. It's just, I suppose, how do we think about the year ahead for books?
Well, this will be a good year for books. And it's right to be far more positive than... You know, we were realistic about the challenges last year. You can't be anything other than realistic. I think we're realistic also about the opportunities this year, both in, relatively speaking, the change cost base, where the front list is excellent. Frankly, we didn't have enough bestsellers.
Mm.
That's on us. But I think the team has pivoted intelligently and creatively. So we're very proud of the suite of books we have upcoming. It's, you know, it is fascinating how audiobooks are still on the increase in an industry where when I first took this job on about 10 years ago, there was a presumption that e-books would be, around about this year, 40% or 50% of total book sales. Well, e-books are down around 17% at the moment, and it's audiobooks that are on the rise.
We've got some, I can't talk about it in specific detail now, but some really exciting plans for e-books in the next, audiobooks in the next month or two, which you'll hear about, to take advantage of that growth. Because the streaming of audio in every respect is something that as a consumer, we're all far more comfortable with. Then when it comes back to cost, the team learned a lot over the experience of the past 12- 18 months. Clearly, it showed that we have to be absolutely focused on, you know, raw materials costs, the logistics, whether it be transporting materials to the printing plant or from the printing plant.
So all of that focus of itself has improved the performance of the business. We indicated at the Q4 earnings call that margins would improve, and I'm fairly confident they will.
In terms of that improving margins, I mean, when I look at books sort of pre-COVID, during COVID, there was that step change in profitability that came through, and then we've come through, I suppose, a more challenging year. Should I think about it as a pre-COVID sort of profitability, with we're going back to a more normalized environment? Or do you think there has been that step change with the acquisitions and then some of the work that's been underway?
Well, I can't be specific about it. I mean, look, COVID really disordered the book market. It turns out that if you have lockdowns and people aren't allowed to leave the house, they read more books. And so in that sense, we're in favor of lockdowns, in a literary sense. But what it also meant is that, dare I say, people bought a lot of books that they didn't finish. They may have read the back cover in some instances. And so what you find with a physical product, particularly one that has an intimacy, like a book, when you see those books sitting by your bedside table or on the kitchen table, or hidden away in an overstuffed bookcase, those almost remind us to stop buying books.
So I think we've worked through some inventory issues. I think readers have worked through some inventory issues.
Yeah. Robert, we're out of time, but really appreciate your thoughts this morning, and I look forward to catching up soon.
Great. Thank you all very much.