Sharewatch: Media Stocks Bounce Back But Sky Still Sore
The majority of media stocks showed healthy growth yesterday, recovering from Wednesday’s disastrous performance, sparked by investor uncertainty in satellite broadcaster BSkyB.
Sky managed a 3.07% rise in share price yesterday, seemingly performing a u-turn on its massive 18.94% dip earlier this week, sparked by news that the company had failed to meet its target subscriber figures.
Anglo-dutch publisher Reed Elsevier also performed well, rising by 1.05% to 481p after the company exceeded expectations with first half pre-tax profits of £433 million.
Elsewhere ITV suffered a dip of 1.22% to close at 101źp despite new figures revealing that total terrestrial television revenue enjoyed a surge of 13.7% year on year during June thanks to the Euro 2004 football tournament (see NewsLine).
The FTSE 100 closed up 0.1% at 4,413.4 yesterday, despite increasing prices of crude oil. The FTSE 250 finished less than 0.1% up at 5,956.8.
The closing prices of media company shares on Thursday were:
