News Corp. said its board of directors has approved plans to split its entertainment and publishing businesses into two separate companies. The company also adopted a shareholder-rights plan designed to prevent a hostile takeover in the volatile trading period after the split is complete.
The New York-based media conglomerate also said Friday that the target date for the split is June 28. The company holding its TV and movie properties will be 21st Century Fox. The new News Corp., a smaller entity, will be focused on newspapers and publishing. Both will be publicly traded, under separate ticker symbols.
The board also approved a program for the publishing business to buy back $500 million of shares after the split, providing a buttress to its share value.
The shareholders-rights plan, known as a poison pill, will make it expensive for any investor to buy more than 15 percent of the voting shares in either company for a year after the split. It does so by giving existing shareholders the opportunity to buy new shares issued by the company for about half the price if that 15 percent threshold is reached.
That allows founder Rupert Murdoch, who will be chairman of both companies and CEO of 21st Century Fox, to buy more shares to maintain his control of 40 percent of the voting stock. Among the new Fox directors is Delphine Arnault of Christian Dior Couture, and Jacques Nasser, former CEO of Ford.