Twenty-First Century Fox 2011 Annual Report Download - page 6

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4 News Corporation
Rupert Murdoch
Chairman and
Chief Executive Officer
News Corporation
Dear Fellow Stockholders:
I have always said that the News Corporation ethos is to see opportunity where others
see only challenge. In 2011, we proved these are not just words. In the teeth of a world
economy struggling with uncertainty, our Company has had a very good year.
In 2011, our revenues rose two percent to $33.4 billion, while adjusted operating
income increased 12 percent to $4.98 billion. We are generating strong cash flow;
we have the most robust balance sheet in our history; and we are successfully
executing our strategy to expand our wildly popular content into even more
countries and onto more platforms.
Here are just a few of our major initiatives:
Q We successfully negotiated important carriage renewals that include critical
retransmission consent agreements with significant players. These agreements
are a critical step toward securing fair market value for our top-rated, free-to-air
network – Fox Broadcasting Company – as well as for our ever-growing stable of
cable channels. At the same time, we increased our ownership in Sky Deutschland
– Germany’s premiere pay-TV platform – and saw substantial progress across
all of its metrics last year.
Q We grew our total newspaper circulations in the U.S. and U.K. markets by increasing
our digital subscriptions, even as the number of print subscribers declined.
At The Wall Street Journal – America’s number one daily, and arguably the best
newspaper in the English language – print and digital circulation has risen in
every quarter since we acquired Dow Jones in 2007. A good chunk of this growth
comes from the increasing number of people who now subscribe to their favorite
paper digitally via their iPads or Android tablets – more than 200,000 at last
count. Yet even as we are now trying to do the same for our British and Australian
publications, we are not content simply to migrate existing publications. To the
contrary, at a time when other media companies are retrenching, we launched
A Letter
from Rupert Murdoch