Thank you. Hello, everybody. I'm Gavin Deane. Welcome to the Deutsche Bank conference at Palm Beach. I'm joined by Susan Panuccio, the Chief Financial Officer of News Corporation, a longstanding member of the community here in Palm Beach at our conference. So thank you for attending again. I thought we might start with something a little bit macro. You run a business that is across a number of geographies, U.S., U.K., and Australia in particular. How do you see the business environment across those geographies in for your businesses?
Well, first of all, thanks for having me again. It's great to be back. So yeah, we start actually each of our board meetings with a comparison of the markets, so the U.K., Australia, and the U.S., and actually from a very, very high-level macro perspective. You know, the key metrics are pretty similar. You know, interest rates have gone up in all of the markets, albeit in Australia the interest rates are a little bit lower than what we see in the U.K. and the U.S.. And most of those markets, you know, they've plateaued and people are expecting the interest rates to come down. Inflation is coming down from the COVID heights in all of the markets, but across all the markets they're above the bank's target ranges. And unemployment's starting to tick up in all the markets.
So all of that is relatively consistent, but actually underneath that there's quite a lot of differences in the markets, and we probably see the most playing out in real estate. We'll probably get onto this a little bit later, I think, but, you know, the Australian market, against all odds, has bounced that really, really strongly. And that property market is very what we would call very, very hot at the moment, whereas the U.S. market is obviously still pretty challenged. And in fact, I think in Q2 we saw existing home sales drop to sort of 30-year lows, so you couldn't get a greater juxtaposition to the markets notwithstanding, you know, the very headline macro numbers are the same.
And then of course we've got two elections coming up in the U.K. and the U.S., and I'm not about to sort of judge, I guess, the outcomes of those elections, but it'll be interesting to see how they play out, and I'm sure they'll have an impact on the markets.
Dow Jones. Should we start talk about Dow Jones? Recent performance has been strong. Professional information in particular has been strong. You're on the record as saying that PIB might be the largest contributor from a profitability standpoint to Dow Jones this year. What's the scope for that to expand further?
Look, PIB's actually, I think, just such a fantastic component of Dow Jones. I mean, you and I've talked about this over many years. I think you've probably been pitching it before I cottoned onto the fact that it was a great business to invest in. You know, when we separated back in 2013 it really was Factiva, so the engine, for that particular part of the business. That's the, you know, content aggregation from licensed products, you know, all around the globe that we aggregate and package out. And we had Risk and Compliance in that segment probably back in 2014. I don't know the numbers exactly, but I guess it was sort of sub-$50 million in revenue. So that sort of started its life as an extension from the Factiva database.
You sort of fast-forward to now where we have separated out Dow Jones from the original news and information services segment. We did that a couple of years ago. Just recently in Q2 we've now provided more transparency to our investors in relation to PIB because it's such a growing important part. So it now comprises Risk and Compliance, which has been seeing double-digit growth, in the team for, you know, the last couple of years. In fact last year, 2023, it delivered, you know, roughly $250-odd million of revenue, which is great. I think six-fold from where it started its life.
We're seeing regulation increasing around the globe and within the different markets, and we're seeing sanctions as a consequence of the sort of the economic and political and social turmoil that we see around the world, ever increasing, and that really is the lifeblood of Risk and Compliance. So we see a really, really strong pathway for that particular business as we go forward. And then the other component of PIB now is Dow Jones Energy, which comprises OPIS and CMA, the two acquisitions that we made a couple of years ago. And those businesses were just great acquisitions. I think Robert, my boss and the CEO, he long held the belief that energy could be quite an attractive add-on for the PIB businesses.
I mean, he's particularly keen on Factiva and has long lamented the fact that we haven't been monetizing it in the way that he had hoped. And so we were very fortunate that we were able to pick up those businesses from a fourth disposition from S&P, so we got them at pretty good multiples. We always have a look at assets in this area, and as you will know that they, you know, they trade for a particularly lofty price. So we got those businesses at very good multiples, and they had lots of characteristics that we liked. They were businesses that we knew we could integrate well into Dow Jones. We could leverage off existing content and product that they already had within the business, and we could leverage the sales teams. They have high recurring revenue, so over 90%, and largely digital, 100% digital.
Lots of components that we like. And we've seen really strong growth. I mean, they grew, I think, 15% in Q2 from a top-line perspective, 20% in Q1, so they've been growing at a higher rate than what they were pre-acquisition. And we do believe that actually with the renewables focus coming up that there are areas that we can branch out in, into those particular businesses that will help them grow. So again, you know, we see actually a really, really strong pipeline of activity. So that they're the businesses that comprise PIB. And yes, you're right. We did say on the record that we are expecting it to deliver over 50% of the EBITDA for Dow Jones, which is just a terrific transformation of that business.
We're really hoping that the investment community will start to see Dow Jones as a very different business to the rest of our traditional news media businesses because it is.
Yeah. And then how do you see the margin profile going forward with that shift in mix?
Yeah, we delivered, I think, about 27.9% margin last quarter, and in 2023 it was just shy of 23%. So we've already seen margin expansion as a consequence of that. And as we move forward and we expect that level of growth will outpace the level of growth within the consumer business. I mean, we will expect to see margin expand. We don't give guidance on exactly what that looks like, but we would expect to see that expand as we move forward.
Digital subscriptions at Dow Jones, there's more opportunity for growth there. And how do you see that domestically? I'll say domestically meaning U.S. in this case, versus internationally?
Yeah, it's another part of the business that we've been really pleased with. We, we now are at, I think, about 78% of our revenues being digital across the Journal. Part of that is probably all Dow Jones as a whole. Part of that is because of the acquisitions we've just talked about. But we have seen really strong growth in our digital subs both within the Wall Street Journal and across Dow Jones. And so we do see even within the U.S. market still quite a lot of scope for growth. We've got a U.S. election cycle coming up this year. That is always helpful for subs growth as we think about the pipeline. And the team has started just recently focusing on bundling, so in the last 12 months.
I mean, we've done a little bit of bundling pre that, but they've been more focused on it in the last 12 months as they're pivoting to look at subscriptions growth as opposed to just subscribers. So how do we get a subscriber to have multiple products? Of course, you know, people who are deep into the subscription business will say that, you know, the more products you can get a consumer to engage in, the greater engagement you'll get. You know, I hear always from the marketing teams, you know, greater engagement that we'll get then the greater lifespan we'll have.
In the investment banking world we call it product density.
Correct. Correct. And so you know we're sort of coming up to, I guess, the cycle for that, nearly 12 months. We will have a look and see, you know, how is that going to manifest itself with us being able to step them up in pricing. How is that looking from a churn management perspective? So within the U.S. market we do still see that there is significant opportunity for growth, and we feel pretty good about that. I think on the international side you know, I've been in this role for seven and a half years and get asked this question a lot, and I've always sort of over the last few years been saying, you know, I think there's a great opportunity internationally. We've never really quite got into our stride in relation to that.
I would say that there seems to be a real difference in the team at the moment, and there's a greater momentum that I hear them talking about in relation to creating products that can exist in different markets. I do think AI will help with that. I think there's a lot of opportunity for us to leverage AI in translation activities that can help us go into some of the foreign markets. We can start to have a look at more localized products that can get penetration in those markets, which I think will be really beneficial. Now we're not going to go into every market around the globe. I think we'll do this in a targeted manner. I do think the team are really starting to come to grips with what that opportunity could look like.
At the moment I think international's only 12% for overall base, which is actually pretty low when you think about it. And if you think about the Wall Street Journal as a brand it's such a well-known brand across the globe. You know, high-quality business information. And I do think that we can build on that as we go forward. So I think on both fronts, you know, given the ebbs and flows of audiences and different news cycles I do think that there's a lot more progress that we can make.
Maybe let's go to books. HarperCollins had a little bit of a tough time, but actually in the more recent period, a stronger recovery. How do you see that progress so far in this, in your fiscal year?
I was listening to something Robert said last week and it made me chuckle. He said that HarperCollins last year had long COVID, which I thought was... it made me chuckle for the way he described it, not because of the financial impact that it had last year. I think you're right. It had a really tough year last year. I mean, partly because of the Amazon reset with their logistics and, you know, having a reset of their returns, partly because of the inflationary pressures that we've seen in relation to printing and manufacturing, and partly because, quite frankly, we didn't have as good a front list as what, you know, we have had in other years, and, you know, that happens sometimes.
I think when we think about this current year, I mean, it's nice to see them return to growth. They've had a great start to the year. The first half has been really, really strong. They've had very good front lists. The back list has performed strongly. Christian Publishing has done incredibly well. I mean, the thing that always amazes people is that we're the—I think we're the largest publisher of Bibles in the world, which people don't naturally associate with us. But Christian Publishing has been doing very, very well. And off the back of a very difficult year last year, Brian and his team have really focused on the cost base, so they obviously partook in the 5% headcount reduction that we did across the globe. That has really helped.
They've worked really hard to rebase their cost base, so they have moved some of their manufacturing from different parts of the world. So for instance, they've come out of China. They're looking to publish some of the books in India now. That has a benefit in the sense that it's a lower cost. It also has lower freight costs depending on where we're shipping it, across the market. We've seen freight costs come down, albeit we are looking at the Red Sea and the activities that are happening over there. We're not really seeing an impact on that to date. So I think a combination of that and some of the pricing work that we did last year, so we increased a lot of our prices across our books, has really helped that business.
I do think that it's put it in good stead for the rest of the year.
What does that mean in the medium term for margins and growth?
You always ask me those questions.
Sorry. There's people out there who want to fill out models.
We, look, we've always thought of HarperCollins, I guess, pre-COVID and pre-last year as a business that, you know, has. It's a pretty steady business. It grows anywhere between 3%-5% at the top line. It's a really good cash converter. Has very low CapEx, and I guess we'd expect to see a return to that. I think the margins so far have picked up at a higher rate than what we had thought they would at the beginning of the year. So we've had a better performance than what we thought. I mean, we always knew we had a better performance this year just because the results were not great last year. But we have been pleased as a consequence of the things I've just talked about that the margins have returned to a pretty robust view.
So I think, you know, we would hope to see that margin, you know, margin expansion will happen, particularly as the shift in the composition of the revenue streams change.
Spotify. You've done a partnership with them on the audio side. Is it worth spending a couple of minutes on what that is exactly and then how it impacts the business going forward?
Yeah. I mean, look, it's great, actually. So we launched a product with Spotify, I think, in the Australian and the U.K. markets in October, in the U.S., in November. It's a consumption-based model, a new product that's out in the marketplace. I think they've got an initial introductory offer of $10 from a consumption perspective. And, you know, we're sort of thinking and I guess they are hoping as well that it will be additive to the market. So as opposed to necessarily cannibalizing existing sales, it's going to be additive and attract a new demographic of audience, with new products. I mean, it's early days, and so time will see how that will evolve. But Robert talks, you know, in a very high way about the management team and the leadership at Spotify. You know, we have a good working relationship with them.
and, you know, it's off to a really good start. I mean, we haven't quoted the numbers publicly. I think we need to do. But what we have seen, though, is that in Q1, before the product was launched, our digital revenue, which was e-books and, and audio, grew about 3%. And in Q2 they grew around 15%. So we've seen a significant uptick since that product launched. And the other thing that is interesting to us is that e-books really have plateaued. I mean, they have over the last couple of years. I think, you know, we all thought that when e-books came out it would probably go down the same path as the traditional newspaper model, and that hasn't been the case. And what we saw in Q2 was audio comprised 49% of that digital revenue, which is really interesting to us.
So I think we see that there's a huge pathway for growth within audio going forward. You know, the, I guess, the traditional books are holding up really well too because people like that tactile experience of reading. So, you know, we're pretty pleased with how that's going, actually, and we hope that that will help the margin profile for HarperCollins as we move forward.
We touched for a second or you touched for a second on AI before. Everyone's talking about it. There are many out there trying to operationalize it. There are many trying to quantify the AI component of their revenue base. Some are obviously seeking to get paid effectively for the content that is being used to train it. How do you see AI in your business?
Yeah. I mean, how long have we got?
Yeah.
To talk about it? I sort of I think there's the good, the bad, and the unknown is the way I sort of think about it. And, you know, I have a boss who has been very vocal about the technology companies for a long, long time, you know, 15+ years. And, you know, Robert talks quite a lot about the risks associated with it. And of course, from a generative AI perspective, every content creator is thinking very, very hard about what impact that will have on our business. But Robert also has been talking about, you know, the compensation models, and we have had seen some success with our traditional publishing business in doing some of these deals with the content providers.
But when we think about AI and we think about our content, you know, Robert talks very much about the leadership of these tech platform businesses and how they think about the content integrity of journalism and why that is so important. And I think it's his belief that we do have leaders at some of these companies that do genuinely get that, that it is really important that we have guardrails around the safety of that. Now, are we going to get it right? How is it going to manifest itself going forward? We don't really know. But what we can say is that the conversations that we're having with some of these companies at the moment, you know, are progressing well. We are seeing that there is a deep recognition for the fact that content integrity needs to remain, and we need to protect it.
And so when we think about the deals that we're looking to strike at the moment, we're thinking about the guardrails that we have to have in place in order to ensure that that content integrity remains as we're thinking about the compensation models. Compensation models in one sense are far easier than the first point. And so on the compensation models, we're having to think about, you know, the incredibly valuable backlog of content that we have built over decades, hundreds of years in some cases, and how does that go to training some of these models. There's also the updates to the models because once they've been trained they have to be continually updated, so we're having to think about that. We're having to think about how these models may synthesize data, when a query comes in.
And so from a variety of different ways, including breaking news and updating the models, we're having to think about how might we monetize those, throughout the course of these deals. I think the other thing too that we are thinking about is how can we work with these companies to help our products be better. And so, you know, one of the things that we struck when we struck the Google deal, from a compensation perspective was that the teams actually get together on a regular basis to have a think about the products because, let's be honest, you know, they have the greatest tech minds in the country, you know, sitting within these businesses. And if we can leverage from that in order to help our products be better, I think that's a really important thing.
So from a sort of commercial perspective, that's the way we're thinking about it. You know, within our own business, I think we see lots of opportunities on both the revenue and the cost sides. On the revenue side, you know, whether we can create new products, you know, whether it's HarperCollins having to think about voices and how they might read books in the future, whether it's around, you know, the personalization that we may be able to create in order to drive new revenue on products, I think is really important. And then on the cost side, you know, we hear a lot about it, and I have to ask the people in the business to show me what it's like.
You know, I was in London recently, and one of the things that the journalists have shown me is that when they create an article in the digital world, you know, they'll do their research, they'll type up their article, and they've now got AI tools embedded within their content management system, their digital system, that can help them publish that story in a much more efficient manner. The journalists are quoting me a number that they should never quote a Chief Financial Officer number because you remember it, but the journalists are quoting me a number around 30% of their time can be saved in creating an article and getting it published as a consequence of these tools. What do some of them do?
They can have a look at all the articles that have been published, everything that we've got in our library, and they can suggest headlines for that article. So it comes up with a list of, you know, five headlines. The journalists can accept them. They can reject it. They can modify it, but it certainly helps with that prompt. It helps them identify keywords for search optimization. So it will, again, go through its library of content and be able to assist in that. And it will also tag all the data so we can obviously use it in a much more efficient manner. And by just doing those simple things, it's saving them 30% of their time in publishing a story. So it's amazing.
That's tools they're using now or tools they're?
No, tools they're using now that we've embedded within the digital system. So we think that is amazing. And then we've got lots of opportunities and sort of examples across the business. So we're sort of having to think about it from both angles. So we think it could be transformative, actually, across the business. And the businesses are really engaging in it, which is really pleasing to see.
Great, great to hear. The journalists in particular.
I find with the journalists, once they get their mind around something, they're quicker than anyone at adopting things. They take a little bit longer because they like to argue. Once they get their minds on it, they actually quicker.
Now, debate is part of the process.
Yes.
Maybe we should go to digital real estate. You touched on this at the beginning as well, but the U.S. housing market has been difficult. You have investment plans at Realtor. There's increased competition in the market. Would you like to just discuss that dynamic for a bit for us?
Yeah. Look, I think it's, from the COVID highs, we certainly have ended up in the lows for the U.S. housing market. And it is a difficult time over here. But we know from the Australian market that once it bounces back, it bounces back hard and fast. And so we want to ensure that we're in the best possible position with Realtor, particularly given the competitive environment, that we can take advantage of that when the market turns, which it will turn. To that end, you know, we've got a new Chief Executive Officer in Damian Eales who is in that business. You know, I've been fortunate that I worked with him when I was down at News Corp Australia back in 2013. He's a terrific guy, a terrific leader. He is someone who is incredibly detailed, and focused and a really good executor.
So he's come into the business. He's having a look at the core proposition, so the core lead generation model, and how our systems are set up within that business. I think his contention is that we could be better. So we have started to invest in parts of that business. The tech stack, particularly, quite frankly, was not good enough. I think it was very clunky from an agent perspective to use, multiple systems, multiple logons, multiple bills. You know, it didn't make for a great user experience. So we're doing work to make sure that that is better. We're doing work on how do we build out the content sets. So how do we make sure that every listing has as much information as it possibly can because we know that's what consumers want.
We know that when they go into a website, they want to look at not just the stats and figures around a home and all the photos. They want to have a look at, you know, what's in the local community, what are the different points of contact, you know, transport, schools, etc., that they can look at. And so we're having a look at how we build out those content sets to make sure that we have as much as possible. That will help with personalization on the journey as well. We've also been having a look at some of our products and which ones we focus on.
So seller the seller model, which we acquired a business called UpNest a little while ago, that's clearly going to be important as we scale out the business, whereas perhaps some other areas we can leverage off other providers like rentals, in order to get a more efficient model going forward. So they're probably the main focus areas. We're also having a look at, obviously, marketing expenditure. Last year, marketing expenditure did drop quite a lot just given the macro conditions and the environment. The one thing Damian is very good at is pitching that business internally. I had actually a Chief Financial Officer conference last year, and I asked all of the Chief Executive Officers to come and talk about what makes a good Chief Financial Officer.
Damian spoke for about 20 seconds on that, and he spoke for about 5 minutes on how those businesses could help him market Realtor across our network. Just didn't actually hit the brief. But what he is doing now is really leveraging the assets that we have within our portfolio for The New York Post, The Wall Street Journal, and actually our sister company in Fox to ensure that we can use the audiences from those particular products to help drive more audiences through Realtor, which helps with marketing. I think he's having a look at it in a variety of different ways.
You've recently announced a rental listing agreement with Zillow. Again, maybe it's worth spending 30 seconds on exactly how it works and then how you see the impacts going forward.
Yeah. We started to go down the path of building out an adjacency in rentals, but the reality is that it is expensive. It is time-consuming, and there are other players out there who have better rental propositions than us. And so, you know, we're a business that I think has exercised very good discipline around allocation of capital. And as I've just said, you know, we've got quite a lot of investment that we need to make within that Realtor business to ensure that it can bounce back strongly when the market picks up. And when we looked at rentals, actually, Zillow has a really strong rental proposition. We thought by doing a deal with them, we could enhance the product that we have. We know that rentals are really important from a consumer perspective because it's the first step on their home buying journey.
So actually, we've been able to save costs by not doing it ourselves, leverage off the audience and the proposition that Zillow has, enhance the proposition that we own that we have ourselves. So we actually think it's sort of a win-win all round, and it's something that is, you know, we can get our end of the market and leverage straight away. We keep the data for that proposition, and we get paid for the leads that we provide to Zillow. So it's, you know, I think it's a good result.
The Australian housing market, by contrast, has been very strong and, I guess, rebounded is the right word. You, I think you said it was hot before. Would you like to comment a little bit about REA's recent performance and the drivers there and how you see it going forward?
Yeah. I think our investors sort of know the history and the backlog for REA, but it's been just a fantastic asset for us. And I think off the back of a very, very strong market this year, we've seen them deliver their highest-ever revenue in Q2. I think it was, you know, AUD 290-odd million of revenue, up over 20% year-on-year, from a growth perspective. And their share price hit an all-time high. It's like AUD 24 billion, I think, roughly, market cap now, which is just astonishing to see how well that business has done. And, you know, they are a great business in being able to utilize the most of what they have. So they push through yield increases each year. This year, it's been a double-digit yield increase.
So that's really helped given the penetration that they have with residential property over there. They have branched out into adjacencies in mortgages and data and valuation tools. You know, mortgages are has not been performing as well just given the market conditions down there, but, you know, we, we have a strong belief that that's going to bounce back strongly. And they've also been investing in India, where we've taken or they've taken the sort of the majority ownership over there, and they've turned that property site into the number one portal over in India, from a digital perspective and audience perspective in what, I guess, arguably is the most populous country in the world. So, you know, I think there's lots of things to be excited about with REA, and they tend to go from strength to strength. So we're really pleased with that investment.
Good. Ad markets. Is it worth discussing for a minute the trends for Dow Jones and news media, in whatever way you want to take those together or apart? And the U.S. elections, obviously, will play into that, although you also got U.K. elections at some point.
Yeah. Yeah. Look, I think the ad markets, and you've probably heard this from, from lots of other people, have been challenging. I think the thing that perhaps we're starting to try and get the market to understand a little bit more is that advertising does not make up as much of our business as what people think it probably does. And certainly, what it historically did, it makes up about 17% of our overall business. Within news media, news media, advertising makes up about 9% of our overall business. And within that, the subset print is even less. And so our performance last quarter for advertising, I think, was down 6% when I think about it across all our different products. Dow Jones was down 4%, but digital grew 1%, which, you know, we were relative.
I wouldn't say we're overly happy with 1% growth, but we're pretty happy off the back of some of the challenges that we've seen elsewhere, whereas the UK and Australia were down in their local markets and local currency about 13% and 14% respectively. So we're seeing, to be honest, I mean, it's different speeds for different products. In Q2, print held up relatively well in the UK and The New York Post, albeit, you know, The New York Post has a much smaller percentage of print advertising, whereas in Dow Jones and News Corp Australia, we saw print almost go back to sort of pre-COVID levels of decline. So it's pretty challenging. From a digital perspective, we saw thesun.com be particularly hit by the algorithm changes that we saw from some of the tech companies.
They grew really, really strongly last year, and they were disproportionately hit in this current year, as was The New York Post. So it's really patchy, and it is, we sort of say in our earnings, it's always hard to forecast. I'm sure people sort of, you know, go, "Oh, well, can't you be a little bit better than that?" But it's actually really hard to because it's pretty short-term now. And when the algorithms do change, it can have an impact on the business overnight. But what is pleasing to see is that we have started to see the audience and the traffic pick up a bit, off the back of, I guess, some tweaks to those algorithms. We're never quite sure exactly what they do, but we can see it in the numbers.
So, you know, we'll have to watch it as we sort of play through the balance of the year. But it is a pretty tough environment. In relation to the political advertising, it is interesting. I mean, I found this quite surprising when I came into this role. We don't really get any political advertising in the U.S. across our products. It's not something that I would have thought. It's something that we've actually set up a committee to try and rectify this year so they can actually start to have a think about how might we capture some of those dollars. So I think any success that they may have, I would think of as upside to our overall numbers.
Does that apply to the U.K. as well, albeit that the U.K. election seems to be?
We don't get a lot in the U.K. We probably get more advertising, or we have historically, in Australia, but then, you know, they get to a certain time, and then actually, they can't advertise in the papers. So we don't tend to pick up a lot from the U.K. I mean, what we do tend to see, though, is that because you do tend to get stronger audiences leading up to a political cycle, that can manifest itself in subs growth. And if you can get that, then, you know, it can lead into sort of upsiding programmatic advertising depending on, you know, what those exchanges look like and what the ad market looks like.
Got it.
But not direct advertising.
Okay. Streaming trends and Foxtel. You've launched Hubbl and Hubbl Glass TV, which, if I understand it correctly, is a little bit like the Sky Glass TV.
Yep. Yep.
You're using those to sort of unify and manage people's streaming subscriptions, if I understand it correctly. How do you see the trends in the business?
Look, I think it's first, I should say, that the Foxtel team and again, we won't go over the history. I think it's done an amazing job, actually, to get that business back to stability. I think it's important to understand that the Australian market is a little bit different to the US market. So whilst the streaming companies over here in the US have obviously been having a pretty challenging time with lots of losses, we haven't seen that over in our business in Australia. They've been able to, from a cost perspective, leverage off the content that they have in their linear and broadcasting proposition in order to drive the subscription products of which we've had out there for a couple of years now.
Actually, up until last quarter, we'd seen, I think, six quarters of growth where streaming revenue upside offset the declines in broadcast. That has helped us stabilize that revenue line. So that's been really positive. We had seen, though, in the last quarter, off the back of the writer's strike, the entertainment product in Binge probably not getting as many customers as what we had hoped to get. It's been a direct knock-on effect from that. We also saw with Kayo we had a weaker summer cycle down there, or maybe the teams didn't perform as well as what we would like from an Australian perspective. That coupled with some inflationary pressures that, you know, we're seeing around the globe has meant that the customers at Kayo we probably had more pause customers at Kayo.
We call them pause because we do tend to see customers come out over the summer months and come back in for the sporting code, the winter sporting code, of which we're just about to start. And so, you know, how much of that is due to the weaker sport cycle? How much is due to inflationary pressures? Difficult to tell. But we'll, we'll have a pretty good view about that now that these winter sport cycles are, are about to start. So I think all up, that team has done a great job in launching those streaming products and providing stability. I think when we think about Hubbl, I sort of think about it as the next iteration of product development within that business. We know we can't stand still with these products.
And we also know from a consumer perspective, which we see over here in the U.S., I'm sure you see this in the U.K., that there's a real pain point with all these different streaming products, and it's not user-friendly for a consumer to easily find the content that they want to digest. So with Hubbl, what we thought we would do is we would partner with Comcast. So, you know, they are a massive company who are investing a lot of money in this product, so we don't have to do it ourselves. We can leverage off the roadmap and the technology that they're building. We can get a proposition out into the marketplace, which hopefully will start to provide or ease some of those pain points that consumers feel. And so, you know, what will it do?
It will provide a single bill across all the services that they subscribe to. It helps for a more seamless search experience across all the different products. It will enable us to be able to bundle our own streaming products in Kayo and Binge with some of these other streamers that are down in the Australian marketplace. We hope that off the back of all of that, that will help drive subs back into our core products. Now, we've got the Puck, and we've got the TV. I mean, we hope and we think that the Puck will probably be the greatest beneficiary of that product. We're not anticipating that we'd be selling, you know, a huge amount of TVs. We'll be focusing more on the Puck. But I think it literally just launched.
I mean, we've talked about it for a while, so but I think it literally just launched over the weekend, so we'll see how that proposition goes going forward. But based on the work that the team has done to date on all the other areas of that business, I think, you know, we're in good stead for that to land well.
Good. We've got a couple of minutes left, so if anybody has a question, please store it, and I'll, I'll, I'll come to you after this next question for you, Susan. It gets asked a lot, so I must ask it. Any updates that you can give on corporate structure, simplification? I think it's fair to say there is a sum-of-the-parts discount in your share price. How do you, how do you think about all of that, or, or to the extent there's anything to say?
Yeah. I can't really comment on that as you would expect me to say, apart from the words and the comments that Robert has already made publicly. And I think, you know, he, he does reiterate the point that we are seriously having a look at our corporate structures and our business as we always do. And I, I think and hopefully, our investors see that we've got a pretty good track record now of being really disciplined about that business. You know, we will focus on anything that we think will maximize shareholder value over the long term, and we'll continue to focus on that. Outside of that, you know, I just keep my head down, and I keep pushing forward the business.
Well understood. Well understood. I don't know if we have a mic in the room. Actually, if there was any pressing question, then please shout. Let's move on if there's no mic in the room. Cost initiatives. It's been a feature of the recent discussions. Where are you at, and how do you see that developing going forward as well?
We actually have a really good cadence when it comes to cost initiatives, which I think continually surprises our investors. You know, we announced the 5% headcount reduction. You know, we'll exceed the cost. So we're at I think we last publicly quoted $160 million. We'll exceed that from a cost perspective. You know, we constantly have a look at ways that we can drive cost savings throughout the businesses. Oh, just in the U.K. recently, they're looking to combine their printing presses with DMG, subject to regulatory approval. We've recently just announced that we're going to come off linear for Talk TV. That should also provide some cost relief within that business.
You know, actually, over in the UK just recently, they had the tabloids together having a think about what they can do across the globe together to ensure that $1 sort of cuts across three businesses in a far more efficient manner. So we feel pretty good that we've got good cost discipline. And I think the benefit of having some of the more challenged businesses within our portfolio who have to go really hard on costs, our growth businesses can leverage off that as well because that's not areas that they would naturally tend to focus on. They tend to focus on revenue growth. And so we can kind of get the best of both worlds. So we feel pretty good about that.
I think we're within a few seconds of time. So thank you again for coming and joining us in Palm Beach.