Profits Up at CBS Corporation

NEW YORK: International licensing revenues and U.S. affiliate and retrans fees were among the drivers of CBS Corporation's first-quarter financials, with profit rising to $468 million despite a slip in revenues to $3.86 billion.

"I'm very pleased to be reporting record first quarter profits, driven once again by our fast-growing, higher-margin revenue streams," said Leslie Moonves, president and CEO of CBS Corporation. "Thanks to the strength of our base business, as well as new opportunities to monetize our content, our momentum continues to build. And we are confident we are still in the early innings of our terrific growth story. Next week, we will launch a whole new set of content franchises when we unveil our fall schedule to advertisers. Plus, we have several exciting additions to our overall programming lineup with an expanded new schedule this summer and Thursday Night Football this fall. As we continue to grow CBS as a content company, we also recently took a dramatic step forward when we successfully completed the IPO of CBS Outdoor…. The separation of this business will bring us that much closer to achieving our goal of becoming a pure content company and, at current market prices, puts us on track to return about $6 billion of value to shareholders in 2014. Looking ahead, with even stronger programming to sell to advertisers, political spending heating up later this year, and new deals coming down the pike in retransmission consent and reverse compensation, we see the back half of 2014 even stronger than the first—and we are positioned for another record year."

CBS attributed the slip in revenues to a difficult prior-year comparison; Q1 2013 included CBS's broadcast of the Super Bowl. Ad revenues in the period were $2.16 billion, as compared with the year-ago period's $2.46 billion. Content licensing and distribution revenues, however, rose 6 percent to $1.07 billion, boosted by higher international licensing of television programming. Affiliate and subscription fees rose 9 percent to $567 million.