Murdoch shops around to take on Amazon's Kindle

News Corp Chief Rupert Murdoch has held talks with Japanese and South Korean companies, possibly sounding out potential partners to rival online retailer Amazon's Kindle electronic reader.

Murdoch, whose media empire straddles the Wall Street Journal to Fox TV, said in August he was unhappy with Amazon's control of relationships with newspaper subscribers for Kindle, and might seek a better deal with rival e-reader maker Sony.

Partnering an e-reader device maker would help News Corp, which owns book publisher Harper Collins as well as newspapers around the world, but which has said it has no plans to become an appliance maker.

Amazon announced it is introducing the Kindle globally, making books and newspapers available on the device in a move that should intensify a nascent battle for the digital book market.

Research firm DisplaySearch expects the $100 million (Dh367m) e-paper market will grow to $9 billion by 2018. E-reader device sales could hit three million this year in the United States alone, according to Forrester Research, and sales could double in 2010.

Forrester predicts Amazon will take 60 per cent of the market this year, with Sony at 35 per cent.

Visiting Japan earlier last week, Murdoch held talks with corporate and political leaders, including Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama, according to a source familiar with the matter.

Murdoch met executives at Toshiba, Fujitsu and Sony to discuss e-reader technology, sources with knowledge of the matter said.

"No contract or deals were discussed. [Murdoch] is just shopping around," said one source with direct knowledge of the matter.

Fujitsu acknowledged that a meeting took place with Murdoch, but said no business deals were discussed.

Toshiba and Sony declined comment.

Later, Murdoch held talks in Seoul with executives at LG Electronics and Samsung Electronics Co, according to sources and local media. Samsung and LG are also working on their own e-reader plans.

LG Electronics confirmed that Murdoch met executives, including CEO Nam Yong, to discuss "business matters". "We have no specific plans," Nam said when asked what the talks had been about.

A spokesman for Dow Jones said Murdoch was in South Korea for "a very brief, private visit" en route to Beijing, where he is due to attend a media summit.


Murdoch sees pick up in TV and print ads

Rupert Murdoch shed some positive light on advertising in the print sector by announcing traditional mediums such as the television and newspapers were picking up in advertising, lifting the sentiment of the industry itself.

The News Corp Chief Executive was speaking at a conference organised by The Wall Street Journal and was quoted in the same newspaper.

When asked whether advertising can be migrated back to the newspaper business from the internet, the newspaper quoted him: "Yes, we are seeing something of that in Australia and in the United States. It may be that [internet advertising] has become something of a secular trend, but we are seeing newspaper advertising coming back, though not yet to its previous levels," he said.

"Television is still the strongest way to advertise," he said during the conference.

"The problem is that 90 per cent of homes [in the United States] have access to 80 to 100 channels, meaning the bigger companies each face getting a smaller share of the overall market," he added. News Corp owns Dow Jones, publisher of The Wall Street Journal.

For its fiscal fourth quarter ended June, News Corp reported a net loss of $203 million (Dh745m), compared with a net profit of $1.1 billion a year earlier, on a 11 per cent decline in revenue as advertising sales at its TV stations fell 27 per cent.

That was because of weak spending by car makers, finance industry and entertainment companies in the teeth of the worldwide financial downturn. (with agencies)

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