News Corp.
The media conglomerate reported fourth-quarter profits on Wednesday that beat analyst expectations, reversing a loss from a year ago, as restructuring charges fell and it sold a Bulgarian TV station.
Net income in the three months ending June 30 came to $875 million, 33 cents per share, compared with a loss of $203 million, 8 cents per share, a year ago.
Excluding the impact of one-time items, earnings were 30 cents per share, handily beating the 20 cents per share expected by analysts polled by Thomson Reuters.
Revenue grew 6 percent to $8.11 billion.
AOL Inc.
The troubled Internet company reported a $1 billion-plus second-quarter loss and tumbling revenue. But AOL is actually chugging along on its long road to recovery.
On Wednesday, AOL reported $1.4 billion in writedowns for the declining value of its assets and the sale of social networking site Bebo.
The company reported a net loss of $1.06 billion, $9.89 per share, in the April-June period, compared with net income of $90.7 million, 86 cents per share, a year ago. Revenue sank 26 percent to $584 million.
PulteGroup Inc.
The nation’s largest homebuilder said Wednesday that it returned to a quarterly profit for the first time in more than three years, as revenue surged amid a rush by Americans to complete their home purchase in time to qualify for federal tax credits.
PulteGroup said net income for the second quarter ended June 30 totaled $76.3 million, 20 cents per share. That compares with a loss of $189.5 million, 74 cents a share, in the prior-year period. Analysts polled by Thomson Reuters, on average, expected the company to break even on a per-share basis.
Transocean
The world’s largest offshore drilling contractor said Wednesday that its second-quarter net income fell 11 percent as it lost revenue from the ill-fated oil rig it leased to BP and charged lower rates for some rigs still in operation.
Transocean incurred after-tax costs of $69 million associated with the sinking of the Deepwater Horizon in the Gulf of Mexico. That was more than offset by $267 million in insurance payments for the lost rig.
For the quarter that ended June 30, Transocean reported net income of $715 million, $2.22 a share. That compared with net income of $806 million, $2.49 a share in the year-ago quarter. Operating revenue fell to $2.5 billion from $2.9 billion.
Republic Airways Holdings Inc.
The parent company of Frontier Airlines reported operating revenues Wednesday of $683.3 million for the second quarter, a 113.6 percent increase, compared with $320 million for the same period last year. The revenue increase was attributed to the acquisition of Frontier and Midwest Airlines last year.
Republic also reported net income of $2.6 million, 8 cents per diluted share, for the quarter, compared with $14.1 million, 41 cents per share, in the second quarter of 2009.
The company’s pre-tax income of $4.8 million was negatively impacted by a total of $19.7 million of items.
