“Thank you very much for having me, and sorry for the delay,” said Fox CEO Lachlan Murdoch, appearing quite late to a Goldman Sachs media conference two days after consolidating control over his family’s media empire.“We are very pleased to be able to move forward and remain focused on the path we’re on,” he said of an end to the long gestating battle fought in a Nevada probate court that ended in a settlement on Monday. He called the resolution good news for investors and that’s generally true although shares of Fox and News Corp. have both drifted lower since the announcement that and his siblings resolved a bitter feud over a longstanding family trust.“It’s great news for investors. It gives us clarity about our strategy going forward. It shows our strategy will be consistent – it’s clear and it’s very sustainable,” he said.His tardy arrival at the conference due to a weather delay led to a truncated Q&A for his first and highly anticipated public appearance since news of the agreement with James and Elizabeth Murdoch, and patriarch Rupert Murdoch’s oldest child, Prudence MacLeod. The three will receive cash funded by the sale of Fox and News Corp. shares valued in the billions of dollars in exchange for their equity in the holding company that controls the broadcaster and publisher.If things had gone otherwise, the three could potentially have voted in tandem to block Lachlan — and potentially change the course of Fox News. Now they will walk away from the company, leaving him in control.“In 2019, as I mentioned, when we sold our assets to Disney and we really set this new path for the company, since then we’ve increased our revenue by over 5 or nearly $5 billion. About $2 billion of that comes from advertising – increased advertising revenue– and about $2 billion from distribution revenue. Due to that, we’ve increased our EBITDA by nearly a billion dollars, and we’ve returned $8.5 billion dollars to investors,” Murdoch said. “We can continue to do that now. We can be very focused on returning capital to investors, driving our profitability and really importantly investing in our core brands, and especially in our great journalism.”Addressing new streaming service Fox One, which launched Aug. 21, he said. “It’s very early days, so I don’t want to read too much into our success over these past few weeks, but I will say its takeup has exceeded our initial expectations,” citing a balance between news and sports.“Big picture, our businesses are firing on all cylinders. We’ve got tremendous momentum across all of our brands.”
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