Despite announcing the annual profit of PBL had fallen 28% after a poor
performance from its flagship Nine Network, James Packer tried to
accentuate the positive in his opening
remarks, reports The SMH, talking up the “unique strengths” of PBL’s diverse business
model and the strong performances from its gambling and magazine
businesses.

Indeed, says SMH‘s Elizabeth Knight, PBL’s profits indicated just how much damage the media industry’s
Little Kerry has done Big Kerry. But Packer’s PBL still claims to
be “Number One.” Even though The Age also went big with the PBL result, “at one level one could wonder what the fuss is about,” says Stephen Bartholomeusz, noting
that Nine’s performance for the year to June wasn’t that of a business
in crisis.

The Patrick board must have had a reasonable basis for its claim that
holders would be better off to retain their shares in response to the
$4.9 billion bid from Paul Little’s Toll Holdings, says The Australian‘s Bryan Frith.
Logic suggests that for the board to reach that conclusion it must have
forecasts, which it regards as reasonably reliable, as to how Patrick
will perform over the next two or three years, relative to Toll.

And while ‘old’ BHP shareholders have done spectacularly well since the merger in 2001, the Herald Sun‘s Terry McCrann
says they would have done even better out of the BHP Billiton merger
if they’d got a bigger slice of the merged entity; or if the merger had
not taken place at all.

On Wall Street, US stocks closed slightly higher overnight in a
market hemmed in by concerns about the negative impact of high energy
costs on economic growth. The Dow Jones rose 15.76 points to 10,450 – MarketWatch has a full report here.