Seacoaster(1) wrote: ↑Mon Oct 16, 2023 8:31 am
Farfromgeneva wrote: ↑Mon Oct 16, 2023 7:31 am
Seacoaster(1) wrote: ↑Mon Oct 16, 2023 6:53 am
Media sources reporting that Hannity is directly contacting House GOP members to support Jordan, with implicit threats…
Seaboard is a mediocre activist IMO but they are up in News Corps a** now. Hopefully that will affect change that’s good for our country.
"Seaboard"?
Sorry not even fat fingers this time like usual just mistyped before. Probably still thinking of the wretched Long John Silvers meal I had a week ago..
Starboard.
Activist Builds News Corp Stake, Plans to Seek Changes - WSJ
Lauren Thomas
Starboard Value has built a stake in and the activist shareholder plans to push for strategic and governance changes at the Wall Street Journal parent.
Starboard believes News Corp, one of the two arms of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire, trades at a significant discount to its fair market value due to its conglomerate structure, according to people familiar with the matter.
Starboard plans to recommend News Corp spin off its digital-real-estate division, which includes a stake in Australian online-property-site operator and Realtor.com parent Move Inc.
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The activist, run by founder and Chief Executive Jeff Smith, also plans to push News Corp to collapse its dual-class share structure, which gives the Murdochs voting power in excess of their economic ownership.
Starboard’s stake in News Corp is “sizeable,” the people said. The exact magnitude couldn’t be learned.
Reuters reported Friday that Starboard had taken a stake in News Corp.
Murdoch and his family have a roughly 40% voting stake in News Corp, according to a recent securities filing. The family has a similar voting stake in
Fox
Corp., which owns Fox News along with local TV stations and the Tubi streaming service.
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That means that effecting change without their consent could be difficult. News Corp earlier this year tried unsuccessfully to sell Move to
CoStar
in a deal that would have carried a roughly $3 billion price tag.
The Murdochs last year proposed reuniting Fox and News Corp through a merger—they split apart in 2013—but withdrew the bid in January following pushback from shareholders including another activist, Irenic Capital Management, which took a roughly 2% stake in News last year and helped whip up opposition to the proposed merger. The activist was unsuccessful in convincing News Corp to spin off its real-estate websites and Dow Jones.
News Corp, which besides the Journal owns the Times of London, other newspapers and book publisher HarperCollins, is also a major player in online real estate through Realtor.com and REA, a publicly traded Australian digital-real-estate business it owns a majority of. It also has a majority stake in Australian cable-television network Foxtel.
Starboard values News Corp’s entire portfolio at over $20 billion, including about $8 billion for REA.
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News Corp’s Class A shares are up roughly 14% so far this year, bringing its market capitalization to about $12 billion.
Starboard argues that News Corp’s Dow Jones business, the publisher of the Journal, Barron’s and MarketWatch, is worth more than $7 billion given the multiple of earnings that the
New York Times
’s parent trades at.
News Corp has been trying to find the right formula for digital growth amid a fierce battle for subscribers and online-ad dollars. During its past fiscal year, the company generated more than half of its revenue from digital for the first time in its history.
Chief Executive Robert Thomson earlier this year said News Corp expected to reduce head count by 5% in 2023 in the face of challenges posed by a surge in inflation and interest rates, which have affected all its businesses, especially book publishing and digital real estate.
The company will soon undergo a significant leadership shift.
Murdoch, News Corp’s executive chairman, last month said he would step away from executive and board duties at both News Corp and Fox Corp. in mid-November. His elder son, Lachlan Murdoch, who has served as co-chair of News Corp, will become sole chair of that company and will continue as Fox Corp. executive chair and CEO.
Recent investments by New York-based Starboard, established in 2002, include Salesforce; Splunk, which agreed to be acquired by Cisco last month for $28 billion; and
Outback Steakhouse
owner Bloomin’ Brands. The activist famously took full control of Olive Garden owner Darden Restaurants’ board roughly a decade ago.
Write to Lauren Thomas at
[email protected]
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