Trying to Interpret News Corp.'s Earnings Data (NWS, RTRSY, TOC)

On Monday afternoon, we’ll get to see earnings out of NEWS CORP (NYSE:NWS). The estimates from First Call for Rupert Murdoch’s now even larger media empire appear to be $0.27 EPS on $8.24 Billion in revenues.  But we would urge caution in really using any numbers for this quarter and perhaps the next two quarters.  This is the first report to have the amalgamated News & Dow Jones Empire and that deal only closed in the final days of the fourth quarter.

We don’t even have any hopes of any formal guidance and we’d only expect a partial report on all the properties that Murdoch & Co. want to keep or get rid of.  How would you like the job of calculating all those numbers from all the units?

As this will be very difficult to interpret, we’d look at Reuters (NASDAQ: RTRSY) and Thomson (NYSE: TOC) if there is a big price change in News Corp.’s stock as those companies are also in a game changing merger that will make each one hard to evaluate.

NEWS CORP’s 52-week trading range is $17.84 to $25.78, so Friday’s near-3% gain to $19.41 leaves plenty of room for this stock to trade in either direction.

Jon C. Ogg
February 2, 2008