LOS ANGELES (AP) - Entertainment media company 21st Century Fox shrank its fiscal fourth-quarter loss after the owner of Fox News Channel and FX shed the publishing division that caused a big write-down a year earlier.
The New York-based company controlled by Rupert Murdoch split from News Corp. in June to focus on its TV and movie business and separate itself from its challenged print newspaper operations.
The loss in the three months to June 30 came to $371 million, or 16 cents per share. In the same months a year ago, the loss came to $1.55 billion, or 64 cents per share.
Excluding the spun-off divisions and one-time items, however, 21st Century Fox posted a profit of 31 cents per share.
Revenue rose 16 percent to $7.21 billion.
Analysts polled by FactSet expected adjusted earnings of 34 cents per share on revenue of $7.14 billion.
Shares rose $1.17, or 3.8 percent, to $32.40 in after-hours trading Tuesday following the release of results.
The company plans to include results for the publicly traded publishing company, which retained the original company's name, News Corp., in a securities filing in the coming weeks.
21st Century Fox Inc.'s pay TV channel revenue rose 16 percent to $2.95 billion, thanks to fee increases charged to distributors like cable and satellite TV companies, and a 10 percent increase in global advertising revenues.
Revenue from local Fox broadcast TV stations was flat at $1.1 billion, as higher fees from distributors were offset by smaller audiences for "American Idol" and "X-Factor."
The company said it expects operating income, excluding one-time items, to rise by a "high single- to low double-digit" percentage in the fiscal year through June 2014 from $6.26 billion in the year just ended.
Growth would be faster except that the company expects to spend more than $200 million launching several new channels, including its new national sports network, Fox Sports 1, next weekend. The company also plans to spend another $150 million to bolster its Fox broadcast network to shore up some of the decline caused by falling ratings for "Idol."