Fox Corporation (FOXA) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Okay. If everyone could please take their seats, we'll get started. Again, I'm John Hodulik, the telecom media analyst here at UBS. And I'm very pleased to announce Steve Tomsic, the CFO of Fox, is our next speaker. Steve, thanks for being here.

Thanks for having us back, John.

Yes. We really appreciate you guys participating every year. And I think we should start by just -- you've had a great year so far. We were just talking out in the hallway, stock up 40%. Can you -- we need to talk about the next year and how you keep the momentum going. So if you could start off by just giving us a sense of the priorities as we look out into '26.

Yes, sure. So listen, as we look out forward, it's always important to see what you're building from. And so it wasn't that long ago, we closed our fiscal '25 is a record year for us, record revenue, record EBITDA, record free cash flow. So that's a really, really important basis and foundation for us because in many respects, it reflects the fact that our kind of collection of assets is super distinguished versus our peers. Like I think people fall into the trap of saying, okay, there are a bunch of cable and broadcast nets and therefore, we get compared to a certain peer group there. We don't see the world like that. We see it in terms of news -- a big news vertical, a big sports vertical and then a bunch of sort of digital investments that we've made that are prospering at the moment. And so it gives people an understanding. It's not just financial records for us. If you look at our engagement because a lot of those sort of cable peers are seeing engagement sort of go down to the left, and we're seeing it going up and to the right, which is really, really, really important distinguishing feature for us. So if you look at our engagement this past October was the -- if you look at across all of our assets, news, sports, Tubi, entertainment, was the biggest month of engagement we've ever had as Fox Corporation. And that's been -- and we've been year-on-year increasing for 19 of the past 20 months. And then if you think about influence over the [indiscernible] and cultural relevance, in fiscal '25, we did 2 trillion minutes worth of viewership. Now that's kind of like an enormous number, which is meaningless. But if you boil that down, that's 75 hours of annual viewing for every man, woman and child in America. And so when you look at that basis, it kind of -- it behooves you to continue to invest and grow our core verticals, which is news and sports. And so the focus for fiscal '26 will continue to be around those key verticals for us. Then we're making great strides with our digital businesses, Tubi being sort of the most prominent there, but we've also launched Fox One successfully. We're starting to build a really, really meaningful podcast business with Red Sea Ventures. And then wrapped up in all of that or part of all of that is this focus or this involvement with enormous events. And so come June, July of next year, we have the FIFA World Cup, which will be the biggest sporting event in the world next year.

U.S. got a good draw. So we should...

Against Australia. So we'll see how we go there. But no, so I think that's going to be enormous. And then listen, if you're generous enough to invite us back this time next year, we'll be picking apart the midterm elections. And so that will be an enormous event for us as well. And so listen, we feel super confident in where the business is at, and we've got really, really strong plans to sort of prosecute against...

That was a great overview, and we're going to touch on most of these points going forward. But let's start with sort of near term, more sort of micro focus. The quarter, I think, was highlighted by the outperformance in the -- on the advertising side. How would you characterize the health of the TV advertising market as you're seeing it today?

I think Lachlan encapsulated it really well on the last earnings call. We've never seen anything stronger. It's been -- and it's not -- I think it's -- there's market, but then there's the market we play in. And I think you've seen this great repositioning of ad dollars, which has basically seen money go from cable -- linear cable entertainment advertising. A lot of that money has gone has sort of leaked out as that viewership and engagement has eroded and has come to places where we play, which is broadcast, particularly sports. It's definitely come to news, as you've seen with our cable advertising growth that you've seen. And it's come to streaming, and we've got Tubi there, which is picking up those dollars. And so we're seeing an incredibly robust advertising market across virtually all of our verticals. The only one that's kind of in that mixed category would be our local TV stations, but they're comping against an enormous political market that we saw this time last year. But sports continues to be incredibly robust. We had the Big Ten championship game this past Saturday, and it's the most cash we've seen -- more cash than we've ever seen for a Big Ten championship game. This time around, we had 65 advertisers on the roster. 2 years ago when we had the last championship game, we're at 49. If I look at our Thanksgiving game, I think that's going to be a record for us, even though it was the early window for us. So there's the bid for sports as people -- as advertisers crave that kind of reach has never been stronger, as I said. It's also gone to news in the sense that for us, FOX News has become the fifth broadcast net. You're kind of getting broadcast reach at pretty good rates. And so we're seeing continued demand for news advertisers, even entertainment, which is a sort of linear broadcast entertainment, which is a pretty small part of our business is because broadcast because of reach continues to perform well for us. So the advertising book, you would have seen even against a Q1 where we were comping against political -- early political revenue in the prior year, we were plus 6% across the book. And so you should expect the visibility we have into the advertising environment is really robust and solid for us.

That's great. And there appears to be, as you referred to, some structural shifts at FOX News with brand advertisers spending more in prime time. Could you talk about the mix in terms of brand versus DR on FOX News and maybe the sort of relative CPMs and sort of what you're seeing?

Yes. So I remember we discussed this when I was here last year, John, we're discussing whether it's structural. I'm not sure if it's structural, but it's absolutely enduring, right? So in fiscal '25, we added the better part of 350 advertisers to the FOX News roster of advertisers. And that's right through the book, whether it be national/brand advertisers, whether it be political, whether it be DR. And not only did we add those, but they continue to spend. And so that's the enduring aspect of it, which is these advertisers are hanging around on the platform because they continue to see -- they see returns from it. The mix -- we haven't seen an enormous mix shift between the amount of money we write from a DR perspective versus the amount of money we write on a national perspective because the competitive tension bids up the CPMs. And so it's -- and we've been able -- because at this time of the year versus last year, we have fewer preemptions, so we've got more inventory. So we're able to cater to everybody. But if you look at it from an advertiser perspective, FOX News offers enormous value to them because they're getting broadcast reach at basically a CPM that's half the level of broadcast. So it's a really, really attractive value proposition for them. So it's kind of like the competitive tension in the book is really helpful because we're able to write on both sides whether -- and we're kind of indifferent to whether it's national advertising or DR, but both of those are growing at healthy levels.

Great. And as you mentioned before, sports has been particularly strong, phenomenal ratings, like you said for the Big Ten Championship for what you're seeing in the NFL. How sustainable is the sort of CPM uplift? And maybe can you give us some sort of sense -- I don't know if you can quantify or talk about what you've seen historically as it relates to World Cup and how you're looking at this summer?

Yes. Listen, there's no signal whatsoever that the bid for sport is going away. I think in a world where engagement is becoming increasingly fractured, sport will just continue -- will only stand out even more as being the place where you get absolute reach. And it's not just reach, it's truly engaged reach. And so the 2 verticals that we sort of have our strongest and leadership positions in is news and sports, where it's not just reach, it's that kind of high level of sort of passionate engagement. And so I don't see -- we'll see in terms of if there's any kind of turbulence in sort of macroeconomic. But from a relative perspective in the industry, it's hard to see that, that shift changes that sport becomes less important. I think it only becomes even more important. And we've seen that through all of our big sports, whether it be MLB, whether it be NFL, whether it be college, whether it be NASCAR. And we've got FIFA World Cup, which will no doubt be -- from what we have visibility and it will be a super successful event from an on-screen perspective as well as financially for us. And so I don't think there's any abatement in that trend.

Got it. And you guys have shown a willingness to sort of shuffle the mix of the sports rights portfolio with Thursday Night Football and WWE. Can you talk about the portfolio you have today and then sort of how you make decisions to optimize the portfolio?

Yes. So we're really, really happy and settled with where the portfolio is at the moment. We have great duration in rights. We have a fantastic mix of what I would call kind of franchise-defining rights for the sports business, so kind of NFL, MLB, college, NASCAR, where sort of -- they define the franchise. They're super important for advertisers, and they're also super important for distributors. And so they really help underwrite the retrans and cable affiliate business that we do with those. So we have a really, really strong presence there. Then we have a really, really neat mix of rights that sit underneath that, which are more what I'd call value-based rights, where we're able to take really, really economic decisions around those rights in terms of understanding their payoff to us. And then I think what we've gotten now, which we -- which we've only just started to sort of delve into is this kind of emerging set of rights, where we're taking the power of our franchise and the power of our platform to help develop that sport. And so the 2 that are in sort of in the gun at the moment, the UFL and IndyCar, where we think we can grow those into meaningful businesses and meaningful sports in the U.S. market, and we're prepared to invest not just money, but also our kind of sort of the platform and the reach of the platform to drive those sports. And in return for that, we not only get the usual advertising and sort of affiliate revenue or distribution revenue that comes from that, but we've got equity stakes in those 2 businesses, where if they turn out to be the success that we believe them to be, then there's an equity carry in those. And so we have to prove that out with each one of those competitions. But we feel pretty good about the portfolio of rights that we have now. We look at everything. The sports guys aren't shy about coming forward and they would buy everything. But no, we feel really good about where the portfolio is, where the longevity of that is and the mix that we have.

Right. There's a lot of conversation about the NFL potentially seeking an early renewal. How would Fox approach this? And could you pull back on the number of games or sort of anything you could tell us about sort of the way Fox thinks about that? And I've heard it could be as early as sort of the '27, '28 season.

Yes. It's way too early to sort of speculate on what sort of an early renewal or an early sort of decision on where NFL finishes, how that composition looks like the game count versus the cash cost and all the rest of it. We see it as an opportunity. We see it as an opportunity to sort of further build on our relationship with the NFL. We see it as an opportunity to again demonstrate to the NFL and to the ecosystem at large, just the kind of the importance we place on the NFL and what we do to cross-promote within our family of properties. And so it's not just NFL broadcast on Fox. It's not just all the work that goes into the pregame and the post game. It's not the production values. It's the promotion in virtually each one of the local markets that we broadcast in. It's the FOX News cross-promotion. It's now the Tubi cross-promotion. And so there's an enormous power that gets brought to bear around those rights. And it is for sort of all of our marketing sports. And so we see it as an opportunity to solidify and lengthen the relationship with the NFL and sort of increase the duration of the key right for us.

Right. Maybe turning to affiliate. You've started early traction with, Fox One. Any color you can give us around subscriber trends or how bundling has helped the overall growth of the platform? In early days, admittedly early days.

It is early days. I'll resist the temptation to give you a [indiscernible] number. But listen, if I look at what we set out to achieve, we're super pleased with where the subcount is at the moment. If I look at other things that we wanted to achieve with the product, we established a price point for the service that's commensurate with the value that service delivers because it's the absolute best of sport, the best of news and entertainment, right? So we've established a price point. We've had a great group of initial partners and bundlers to help distribute the service. And so the first cabs off the rank there have been Amazon, which has been a fantastic partner for us. We've got bundles with ESPN and Verizon. You should expect more of these to come because I think people naturally want to attach ourselves naturally want their product to be attached with our bundle. And then the other piece to it is sort of the neat mix of content and the way that's been consumed. And so what we've seen from a behavioral pattern is that we've seen that on the weekends, we get a lot of our subscriber acquisition and we get peak viewership for the sports that gets -- that comes with that. But then through the week, we've had this really nice balance of consumption between news, entertainment and sports. And so we feel really, really good about how we've come out of the gate with this product. It is early days, and we totally recognize that given sports has been such an important subscriber acquisition driver for us, our sport is really concentrated between sort of the start of the fall through to the end of winter. And so we'll see how the service shakes out over the full year. Could help. Totally it will. I was just about to say we've got that sort of -- we've got a sort of brief period in between, but then there will be this enormous tournament. So we feel like really, really good about how that's opened up.

Has the availability of FOX One impacted your affiliate negotiations or any deals that you guys have done? Does it hurt you guys from a pricing standpoint?

No, it shouldn't, right? Like we've been totally clear about this. All of our affiliates are able to use the benefit of FOX One for their own subs. So first and foremost. We've made it sort of from a pricing perspective, we've made it that the retail price doesn't undercut the input price that we charge them on a wholesale basis for what we offer them on a bundled basis, on a wholesale bundled basis. So -- and then if you've looked at our on-air, you won't see FOX One being promoted on our kind of linear for one of a better phrase, airtime. We totally see this product as being something targeted at -- for the cordless. Evidence to date -- we don't see any evidence today that suggests that the subscribers that we're acquiring is anything other than those coming from outside the bundle. And so for us, it should be additive to us, and it should be absolutely additive to our distribution partners. And so -- there's always the argy-bargy of negotiations. But no, we feel like this is totally complementary to what we do. It was always meant to be complementary and always meant to be additive. And so far, the strategy -- our go-to-market strategy has sort of proven that out.

One other thing I was just thinking of when you sort of start off by talking about some sort of new comps that are not necessarily good comps just given their ratings trends they've seen, but you have Versant that is being spun out and then you have Discovery Global Networks, both sort of almost pure play but sort of linear TV companies that don't have any sports, right? I mean the sports and the networks are being -- depending on the company are being sort of held back. So you've got these sort of -- I want to say stranded assets, but you've got these businesses that are being carved off within the ecosystem. In the Fox view, does that change the pricing dynamic? So you guys -- your ratings are going different -- your sports and news are going in a different direction. You have these very -- these are actually big drivers of -- there's a lot of viewership still on these platforms. Does the fact that they might -- first of all, I don't want to necessarily -- unless you want to comment on other companies, but it would seem that they would have less pricing power, but that would leave more sort of money in the ecosystem for companies that are really getting a lot of viewership. So do you think that helps your case at all having these sort of spinouts, big spinout. These aren't small.

No channel groups. Yes. No, listen, we've said since the Investor Day, right, where we put up that we're going to do $1 billion extra of retrans, which we eclipsed really quickly. We've always said that the value we offer the bundle -- and our fidelity to the bundle should always mean or should have always meant and should continue to mean that we take greater share of wallet because we just think that the sort of the concentration of what we deliver to the bundle and the -- we're totally distinguished. They will run their own race these spin-offs. The creation of Fox Corp came from the Disney transaction, but it was a very deliberate strategy in assembling the assets that we have as Fox Corp to be able to thrive in the current environment. So we absolutely expect that we should get greater share of wallet. And it's irrespective of the spins of these businesses. It just -- it should be something that we, as a company, set ourselves in terms of our own internal targets for distribution income.

That makes sense. Maybe turning to Tubi. Tubi has been a consistent outperformer. Any color you can give us on how ad growth has trended so far this quarter? And how are you thinking about growth in that platform from here?

Tubi has been an enormous success for us. You would have seen in Q1, we were plus 18% engagement, plus 27% in ad revenue, which are enormous numbers, right, for a platform that's actually starting to get to scale. So right now, I think if you take our Q1 revenue and annualize, we're at $1.2 billion run rate -- annualized run rate, and it will only grow from there, right? Q2 is a bit of a funky quarter. We're still seeing that kind of double-digit engagement growth. But Q2 last year, we had a pretty reasonable whack of political revenue at Tubi. So you won't get that plus 18 plus 27 dynamic happening. But the advertising trend -- the engagement trends, which is the basis for everything continues to be there. And the advertising trends are there. It's just Q2. But if I look at it from a full year perspective, we feel very confident about how Tubi is placed and how that revenue is tracking.

And could you talk a little bit about what you're seeing in terms of CPMs? We talked with -- we had the ad panel this morning, they talked about continued pressure, modest pressure and eventual turning in that, just given all the inventory and competition, especially on the free side. Just what are you seeing in terms of both demand and pricing sort of CTV CPMs?

Yes. When -- there's been a bunch of big kind of big streaming platforms that have introduced ad-supported tiers. When we heard the kind of CPMs that were coming out with, we thought if Tubi could get to both my God, Tubi is a very, very big business. Tubi has always been priced on sort of a better value than many of those start. And so as those -- as our peers' pricing has pared back, Tubi has come back a touch, but it's always been sort of on a sort of euphemistically has been a value-based pricing approach. And Tubi's revenue growth hasn't been coming from CPM growth. It's largely been coming from improving fill rate, improving engagement, obviously. So whilst we understand the whole streaming market has seen CPM sort of rollbacks, Tubi hasn't had -- hasn't been as afflicted by that as others because it just started at a at probably a more realistic level.

And getting back to fill rate. So fill rate will sort of be the -- or has been the driver or will continue to be the driver -- I guess, and engagement, like you said. So any view on sort of change in trends or when you could see the sort of supply-demand equation start to normalize or improve?

No, I think the way we look at it is, first and foremost, we want the Tubi viewership experience to be kind of something that the viewer wants to come back to, right? So we almost have a self-imposed limit of kind of mid-single-digit minutes an hour of advertising space that's allocated. And that changes, right, depending on -- we can toggle that up or down depending on the life cycle of the viewer and all the rest of it. But that's kind of where we want to average out to. And then we sort of play with the variables around engagement growth versus -- and engagement and fill rate or engagement and ad load are related, right? So we toggle with that relationship, and then we toggle with the relationship around ad load, fill rate and CPM. And so we've been able to manage that to continue to grow that advertising revenue, so plus 27% by toggling those around. From a monetization perspective, we totally think we're undermonetized from a Tubi perspective, which goes to the opportunity as we look forward because we think we can continue to grow fill rate. We can -- and if CPMs begin to sort of stabilize and eventually grow, then that's total upside for Tubi. So we feel pretty good with how we're managing that -- those sort of different variables. And we still think that there's a ton of upside in that monetization journey.

Great. So Tubi reached profitability this past quarter. How sustainable is that? And how quickly can we see margins reach the sort of 20% to 25% level that you guys have spoken to?

I'd like to think it's very sustainable, right, because we didn't -- we haven't invested in the business for it not to be. You'll see -- listen, I wouldn't commit here to sort of say every quarter from here on forward is going to be profitable. But listen, this is -- we lost the better part of $200 million on Tubi last fiscal year. We will lose a significantly lesser amount in the coming year. And this -- and being breakeven in Q1 is a significant milestone for the service. And so it's a huge tick. It's a huge tick for the management team there led by Anjali. And I think from -- as I said, not every quarter will naturally be positive for us. There will be seasonality and we'll dip into investment as the year progresses. But we totally feel as though Tubi is on that pathway to being on an annual basis, breakeven really soon. And then I don't want to give a time frame for how we -- we've talked about 20%, 25% sort of EBITDA margins on Tubi, and we sort of absolutely see a pathway towards that. But we want to keep flexibility as -- in terms of the time it takes for us to get to there because we want to retain flexibility because if we see opportunities to sort of grow faster and maybe spend a little bit more money, then we will. But I think it's an amazing milestone that we achieved in Q1, and I think that it's up and to the right for us from a revenue and profitability perspective for Tubi.

And sort of putting all the digital together, it seems the total digital net investment is trending better than the $350 million drag you previously suggested for the year. Any help in sort of sizing that -- what you're seeing in terms of?

I think too much has been said of it, to be quite honest. Like in the context of the size of our business, we said $350 million 2 years ago, and then that came down to the high 200s. We said $350 million for this year. I think it's inside of that. But it's inside of that, like if we -- I think you've got to give us the benefit of the doubt to be able to invest in positive IRR projects in the business. Now I think as we sit here today, we'll be inside of $350 million for sure. But if we see opportunity and we can see sort of really attractive investment cases, we'll do so. But we feel like -- I think when you look at Tubi is doing better than we expected, Fox One is doing better than we expect, and they're the 2 sort of big drivers there. It's all for the right reasons that it's sort of the $350 million is the outside, but I think too much is made of the number.

Got it. Makes sense. Maybe one question on sports betting. Just talk about the process in sort of getting licensed in each state. What does that mean once that process is done? And maybe when do you think it's going to be done? And then anything you could help us with in terms of the strategy for sort of long term on the sports betting side?

So maybe I'll start with the second one first, right? So for people who don't know, we have an investment in Flutter at the topco level, which is worth -- I think today, it's worth $900 million. And we also have an option over Flutter's FanDuel business of 18.6% of it, I should say. And when you look at Street forecast of where they have FanDuel valued within the kind of constellation of assets within Flutter, you look at our strike price versus where sort of 18.6% today. So the kind of spread between the strike price and what for want of a better phrase, the median value that the Street puts on FanDuel is worth $2.5 billion to us. So $2.5 billion at the auction level and another $900 million at the headco level. And so it's $3.4 billion of value that we have in sports betting with large. So our strategy is like we have been believers in sports betting. We've seen how it's developed in overseas markets that are native to some of the management team at Fox. And we've been believers since they built for it. And so we have sort of long term -- our long-term strategy here is to hold that asset. And so in order to hold the asset, we have to get licensed. Flutter operates in sort of the mid-20s kind of number of states, and we're in a conversation with each one of those states about that licensing process. The fact that at a Fox ownership level, the cleanup of the Murdoch trust issues is super helpful. It just makes that kind of string of licensing requirements that potentially goes up to that kind of at that shareholder level, it becomes more simplified.

It just means fewer people need to be.

Exactly. And so that makes our life easier. So we'll constructively work our way through it. The option has a deadline date for the end of 2030. And so we've got 5 years to exercise that option. So you should fully expect we're total believers in the category that we're going to get licensed in order to fully harvest that value.

Pan Shop then what -- I mean, so how do you sort of tie those assets together and sort of extract value? Is it -- you launch your own -- you have some experience with FOX Bet, but do you launch your own service? ESPN have some fits and starts with their betting strategy.

Yes. I think, listen, FOX Bet ESPN had whatever its issues were. And I think FOX Bet was caught up in the fact that it was FOX Bet was the younger brother to FanDuel and what happened and what happened there. So that's in our rearview mirror. But no, we think that we don't necessarily want to operate a sports betting license on our own, right? We think that we have enormous respect for what Flutter brings to the table in terms of sports betting prowess. And so we're happy as a sports business to have that kind of -- to bring the sports broadcasting element to it. But we're happy to be sort of like an investor in something that we see as having decades of growth ahead of them.

Got it. Maybe shifting to capital allocation. You announced a $1.5 billion ASR last quarter. Any updates you can provide on the status of the program? And how should we think about the $1 billion per year in buybacks that you guys have historically executed on?

Yes. So listen, I think from a capital allocation perspective, we have -- we see a lot of value in our stock, right? And so you've seen us before we announced the $1.5 billion ASR, we're at $6.9 billion of purchases up until that time with the $1.5 billion, we'll be at $8.4 billion. And I think the ASR will take the better part of the fiscal year to complete. We're already in market with it. But -- so it takes to $8.4 billion. If you add the dividends that we've paid since the start of Fox, will now be well north of $10 billion of capital returned to shareholders. So that's a pretty significant move in that direction. You should expect us to continue to be balanced with capital deployment going forward. I think if anything, we've been imbalanced as we sit here today because the vast majority of our capital has gone back to shareholders, and there's been a relative -- all of our organic investment has been funded out of free cash flow. And in terms of inorganic investment, we're kind of -- we're less than $2 billion on a net basis. And so -- but you should expect us to -- while the stock is where it's at -- when we look at our stock, we think it trades kind of -- when you adjust for all the below-the-line assets, it trades at like 6x EBITDA. We think it's still fantastic buying at that level because we think that the assets that we have amazingly unique. And so we'll continue to buy back stock. And if we see an opportunity inorganically, we obviously won't be shy there. But we -- we look at everything. But 7 years after the launch of FOX, like the best place for our capital has been to buy back our own stock really cheap.

And just in summary, along those lines, what are some of the opportunities that you guys look at on a sort of day-to-day basis? And Fox has the scale to keep performing the way it has over the last few years, hitting all-time highs seemingly each week. Just given what you're seeing in terms of the landscape, the spins, the mergers, do you think that there's -- given present course and speed and sort of your investment view of the world, do you have the assets to continue with this kind of the performance?

If anything, since 2019, I don't think we feel any better about the quality of the assets in the portfolio. So from -- we want for nothing from a portfolio perspective. We have a pristine balance sheet. We have fantastic free cash flow that's delivered by those assets. And so to go to your point, we look at everything, it's an extremely high bar. And so if there was something that took our core verticals to another level, which is sports and news or if there was something that would benefit from the other thing, which is our capacity to aggregate reach and really, really passionate reach, we look at it, but nothing has ticked all the boxes. And so -- but we feel like we're in a fantastic position, both from a portfolio perspective and a balance sheet perspective to be able to pivot however we want to.

Perfect. I'll leave it right there. Steve, thanks for joining again.

Thank you for having us.