Date: 1st September 2000

A Good News/Bad News Day For News Corp


Rupert Murdoch's News Corp said Thursday that it plans to buy back as much as $1.5 billion worth of its preferred stock during the next year. It said it was doing so because it had extra cash on hand. But analysts noted that such a buy-back strategy would also boost the value of News Corp's assets as it gets set to spin off its satellite TV companies as a single entity, Sky Global Networks, by the end of the year. Ironically, word of the planned buy-back came as News Corp's premier satellite service, BSkyB, plummeted more than four percent to a three-month low following Germany's KirchGruppe's announcement that it had sold its remaining 3.1-percent stake in the company for $865 million.

Source: Studio Briefing