Cable news and media network Fox (NASDAQ: FOXA) beat Wall Street’s revenue expectations in Q4 CY2025, with sales up 2% year on year to $5.18 billion. Its non-GAAP profit of $0.82 per share was 58.6% above analysts’ consensus estimates.
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FOX (FOXA) Q4 CY2025 Highlights:
- Revenue: $5.18 billion vs analyst estimates of $5.09 billion (2% year-on-year growth, 1.8% beat)
- Adjusted EPS: $0.82 vs analyst estimates of $0.52 (58.6% beat)
- Adjusted EBITDA: $692 million vs analyst estimates of $461.8 million (13.4% margin, 49.9% beat)
- Operating Margin: 36.3%, up from 13.4% in the same quarter last year
- Free Cash Flow was -$791 million compared to -$436 million in the same quarter last year
- Market Capitalization: $29.53 billion
Company Overview
Founded in 1915, Fox (NASDAQ: FOXA) is a diversified media company, operating prominent cable news, television broadcasting, and digital media platforms.
Revenue Growth
Examining a company’s long-term performance can provide clues about its quality. Any business can have short-term success, but a top-tier one grows for years. Unfortunately, FOX’s 5.5% annualized revenue growth over the last five years was weak. This fell short of our benchmark for the consumer discretionary sector and is a rough starting point for our analysis.
Long-term growth is the most important, but within consumer discretionary, product cycles are short and revenue can be hit-driven due to rapidly changing trends and consumer preferences. FOX’s annualized revenue growth of 6.7% over the last two years is above its five-year trend, but we were still disappointed by the results. 
We can better understand the company’s revenue dynamics by analyzing its most important segments, Advertising and Affiliate, which are 47.4% and 38.6% of revenue. Over the last two years, FOX’s Advertising revenue (marketing services) averaged 9.6% year-on-year growth while its Affiliate revenue (licensing and retransmission fees) averaged 5% growth. 
This quarter, FOX reported modest year-on-year revenue growth of 2% but beat Wall Street’s estimates by 1.8%.
Looking ahead, sell-side analysts expect revenue to grow 1.3% over the next 12 months, a deceleration versus the last two years. This projection is underwhelming and suggests its products and services will see some demand headwinds.
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Operating Margin
FOX’s operating margin has been trending up over the last 12 months and averaged 23.7% over the last two years. The company’s higher efficiency is a breath of fresh air, but its suboptimal cost structure means it still sports lousy profitability for a consumer discretionary business.
This quarter, FOX generated an operating margin profit margin of 36.3%, up 22.9 percentage points year on year. This increase was a welcome development and shows it was more efficient.
Earnings Per Share
Revenue trends explain a company’s historical growth, but the long-term change in earnings per share (EPS) points to the profitability of that growth – for example, a company could inflate its sales through excessive spending on advertising and promotions.
FOX’s EPS grew at a weak 10.2% compounded annual growth rate over the last five years. On the bright side, this performance was better than its 5.5% annualized revenue growth and tells us the company became more profitable on a per-share basis as it expanded.
In Q4, FOX reported adjusted EPS of $0.82, down from $0.96 in the same quarter last year. Despite falling year on year, this print easily cleared analysts’ estimates. Over the next 12 months, Wall Street expects FOX’s full-year EPS of $4.70 to grow 5.6%.
Key Takeaways from FOX’s Q4 Results
It was good to see FOX beat analysts’ EPS expectations this quarter. We were also excited its EBITDA outperformed Wall Street’s estimates by a wide margin. Zooming out, we think this was a good print with some key areas of upside. The stock remained flat at $70.18 immediately following the results.
So do we think FOX is an attractive buy at the current price? If you’re making that decision, you should consider the bigger picture of valuation, business qualities, as well as the latest earnings. We cover that in our actionable full research report which you can read here (it’s free).
