Fox Corporation (NASDAQ:FOX) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Phil Cusick: A couple of questions and then a quick one. On tub, it sounds like your TBT is still outgrowing revenue, but are you starting to unleash the revenue and profit there a little bit. And then on the legal side, any direction on legal expenses from here? And then one stand-alone, any thoughts on appropriate leverage and capital return from here? We appreciate the $1 billion, but how should we think about this? Are you still going to sit on the cash until we get to the next sort of legal view? Or should something happen between now and then?

Lachlan Murdoch: Thanks very much, Phil. On — let me start with Tubi and apologies, Steve, for the capital management element of the question. So on Tubi, we’re going to continue to invest in Tubi. It’s at the same levels. We’ve been investing over the last year or so. We just think it’s a tremendous opportunity for us. As I mentioned in my comments, the fact that we’re now — Nielsen’s Gauge now has us over 1% of the U.S. television viewing is a tremendous sort of benchmark to have hit, and I see continued growth there. So from a consumer aspect and from a marketer’s aspect, Tubi is becoming more and more a central part of usage and sort of an opportunity. And this is really because the focus Tubi’s had or not — we think of it over the last 3 years with our involvement, but obviously, the team there has done a tremendous job not only over the last 3 years but before that in really sort of driving sort of the best-in-class personalized AVOD experience, building an incredible library with nearly 55,000 titles in the U.S. alone.

And again, to put that in context, that’s 5 times the size of the Netflix library and now really being able to monetize that viewing in a more efficient, better way. So we’re incredibly optimistic. And I would say the results are — and we’re incredibly pleased with the performance of tb going forward, and we think it’s an appropriate area for us to continue to invest in. On the — I’ll turn it over to Steve on the — on sort of capital management. But just on it, I’ll just start by saying, look, we have a $7 billion buyback authorization. I think we spent about $4.4 billion of that. So we’ve — my math’s incorrect this time of the morning, a $2.6 billion remaining of the authorization. We fully expect to deploy all of that capital back to shareholders through our buyback.

And any litigation has no impact on that at all. Yes, Steve.

Steven Tomsic: Thanks, Lachlan. So Phil, just to go back on legal costs, legal costs over the last two orthree3 quarters have been elevated. Obviously, we’ve been deep in the depositions and pretrial preparation for Dominion. So I’d expect that to subside over the next couple of quarters. And then to just pick up on Lachlan’s point, listen, we — the leverage is the debt we have, $7.2 billion, we’ve got a maturity in January, which we’ll make a call on as to whether to repay or refinance. But the leverage feels about right where we are at the moment. And our cash position is strong. And so we would anticipate whatever happens with future litigation, we can continue to continue to go with our buyback pacing as it has been over the last couple of years now or a few years now as well as leaving us flexibility to invest in the business or take advantage of any inorganic opportunities, but we’ll be balanced about it as we’ve been saying since the formation of the company.

Operator: And that will come from the line of John Hodulik with UBS.