What’s Up Walt

The Walt Disney Company holds a diverse portfolio of brands and assets. These include Disney, Marvel, Star Wars, Pixar, 21st Century Fox, sports broadcaster ESPN, and Disney Experiences. Since the onset of the pandemic, Disney has faced challenges in maintaining its previous level of success. The segments have not always done well simultaneously.  

Disney’s multiple business segments that drive the revenue for the company: 

1. Experiences – includes their theme parks and Disney cruises. 
2. Entertainment – includes their streaming platforms, linear tv assets, and box office hits .
3. Sports – includes their ESPN assets.  

During the Covid pandemic, Disney’s streaming service, which was in its early stages, contributed to the company’s growth. The strategy was to leverage its extensive catalogue of creative and entertainment Intellectual Property (IP) to attract more users to its brand and transition users from its traditional linear television business to a more streaming-focused model.  

Its Direct-to-consumer business (DTC) which includes Disney+ and Hulu, currently have just under 175 million paying subscribers globally. Average revenue per user (ARPU) per month in the United States for Disney+ is $7.70, compared to Netflix, which has an ARPU of $17.06. Netflix’s streaming service also boasts 282 million subscribers globally, over one hundred million more than Disney’s streaming platform.   

Growth at Disney for its DTC business has slowed significantly since the peak during the Covid period. Revenue for the quarter for its DTC business increased by 16% to $5.8 billion. A notable development is that Disney’s operating income for their DTC platform was positive at $0.3 billion for the current quarter, an improvement from a peak loss of $1.5 billion in Q4 2022.  

Disney’s parks and experiences business had the highest operating income among its segments, reaching $1.7 billion for Q4 2024. The segment performed well following the COVID-19 pandemic due to increased demand. However, with consumers facing financial pressure, the experiences business saw a year-over-year growth of only 1%, totalling $8.2 billion for the the quarter.

Disney’s CEO Bob Iger has stated that the current focus of Disney is to return creative control to their various brands and segments. He asserts that producing quality content for audiences encourages engagement with related content, whether from their streaming platform or their experiences business. It remains to be seen if Disney can effectively compete across all its business segments in the extremely competitive entertainment industry.