Lot of salt - lot of salaries...

News Corp's $6.4B loss - job cuts loom

The media empire misses estimates, and CEO Rupert Murdoch expects the company to 'reduce head count where appropriate.' February 5, 2009: 5:07 PM ET NEW YORK (Reuters) -- Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. reported a quarterly net loss because of an $8.4 billion write down on Dow Jones and other assets, as the recession dragged down advertising revenue. Excluding the impairment charge, the media conglomerate said Thursday its profit was 12 cents per share for the fiscal second quarter ended Dec. 31, missing the average analyst forecast of 19 cents, according to Reuters Estimates. Shares of News Corp (NWS, Fortune 500) fell 2% to $6.79 in after-hours trading, from their Nasdaq close of $6.94. "While we anticipated a weakening, the downturn is more severe and likely longer lasting than previously thought," Murdoch, the company's chairman and chief executive, said in a statement. "We are implementing rigorous cost-cutting across all operations and reducing head count where appropriate." News Corp's net loss was $6.41 billion, or $2.45 a share, compared with net income of $832 million, or 27 cents a share, in the year-ago quarter. The international media conglomerate said that operating income, adjusted for special items, was $818 million, down 42% from $1.4 billion a year ago. Revenue fell 8.4% to $7.87 billion, compared with the average Wall Street forecast of $8.35 billion. News Corp is the latest media conglomerate to report gloomy financial results as advertisers slash their budgets in the weak economy. This week, Time Warner Inc (TWX, Fortune 500) posted a $16 billion quarterly net loss because of a writedown, and Walt Disney Co (DIS, Fortune 500) posted a sharply lower-than-expected profit in part because of poor TV ad and DVD sales. News Corp. owns the Fox television network, Wall Street Journal parent company Dow Jones & Co., the MySpace online social network, newspapers throughout the United States, Britain and Australia, and satellite TV network Sky Italia.

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FEBRUARY 4, 2009, 7:30 AM

Financier Buys Plaza Penthouse After All

Ruth Fremson/The New York TimesThe Russian financier, Andrei Vavilov, in 2007.

Updated, 11:35 a.m. | A deep-pocketed financier who planned to buy two penthouses at the Plaza Hotel, then sued, saying his finished apartments resembled “glorified attic space,” has decided to buy the smaller of the two apartments after all, a person familiar with the closing said. The buyer, Andrei Vavilov, is a Russian hedge-fund manager and former finance minister who had gone to contract to buy both penthouse apartments in February 2007 for a combined price of $53.5 million. He put down a deposit to buy the smaller unit, number 2011, for $14 million. But then in September, Mr. Vavilov sued the developer, El-Ad Properties NY LLC, saying he was not happy with the two penthouses after all. El-Ad fired back with a countersuit claiming that the buyer had made “defamatory and untrue” statements about the developer and called the lawsuit a “sham.” The countersuit claims that on June 26, 2008, Mr. Vavilov had walked through the apartment at first without his wife and did not complain about the apartments to the two El-Ad employees who accompanied him, court records show. Then, when Mr. Vavilov’s wife — the Russian actress Maryana Tsaregradskaya — arrived and saw the units, she said “they were simply not large enough for her tastes.” She told El-Ad employees she wanted to have “the biggest apartment at the Plaza.”

Public records show that unit 2011 sold for $11.1 million to Hayling Island Inc.