This has been the year of BIG announcements from the Walt Disney Company–and now we just got even more!
Cinderella Castle
Disney has announced the opening of new lands at its parks, new character meet and greets, new movies, new hotels, and that they are planning on spending $60 billion on parks and entertainment in the next 10 years (double from the past 10 years). There have been TONS of changes happening to help the company. Now Disney has given us a glimpse into what’s really been going on for them financially– let’s check it out!
On November 8th, 2023, Disney held their fourth-quarter earnings call which also included a look at the full fiscal year. At this earnings call, Disney shared some insight into all the financial happenings within the company. This gives us a peek ‘backstage’ of how things are going. During this final report of the year, we learned some very important details regarding the health of the company overall and its outlook as they enter the 2024 fiscal year.
Overall Financial Results
Overall, the Disney company reported the following results for Q4 of FY23 and for the fiscal year in general. Revenues for the quarter grew 5% and 7% compared to the prior year-quarter and prior year, respectively. The revenue for this past quarter was $21.2 billion, and $88.9 billion was the revenue total for the fiscal year.
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Entertainment revenue was $9.5 billion this quarter, with direct-to-consumer business making up $5 billion of that total. The Parks, Experiences, and Products division pulled off a revenue of $8.1 billion, up from $7.2 billion the same quarter last year.
Magic Kingdom
But what portion of that revenue translates into income? For the Entertainment division, $236 million was the operating income for Q4 — a significant improvement from Q4 2022 where the income was a loss of $608 million.
The company also let us in on how the Disney+ subscribers numbers were looking.
Disney+ Subscribers
These results are before the company began to lock down on subscribers sharing their accounts, so these numbers do not take that into consideration. We should begin to see the results of that lockdown in the Q1 of FY24 reporting.
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Overall, the company saw 7 million new core Disney+ subscribers, which beat expectations and predictions for the year. With those subscriber results in mind, take a look at the financial status of Disney+ in general.
Disney+ Financial Status
Disney+ had previously seen an overall increase in revenue from Disney+. It’s important to note that the current deal in the works between Disney Hotstar and Reliance Industries to sell all of its Indian operations is also happening past the deadline of FY23, so those numbers are not part of these results.
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According to the Q4 earnings report, Disney+ revenue saw an overall increase of 3% from Q3, growing from $7.31 billion to $7.5 billion. The report shared that this was due to higher advertising revenue. The company also shared that the Disney+ Hotstar average monthly revenue per paid subscriber increased from $0.59 to $0.70 due to a lower mix of wholesale subscribers and higher advertising revenue.
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After Disney’s recent acquisition of Hulu, average monthly revenue per paid subscriber decreased from $12.39 to $12.11, and and Hulu Live TV average monthly revenue per paid subscriber decreased from $91.80 to $90.08 primarily due to lower advertising revenue.
Theme Park Updates
As stated previously, Disney has plans to invest $60 billion into its theme parks and entertainment division. We generally see the theme parks being the highest source of revenue, and this quarter showed similar results, no doubt thanks to Disney celebrating both the 50th Anniversary in Disney World and the 100th Anniversary in both Disneyland and Disney World.
Cinderella Castle
Compared to 2022, Parks and Experiences saw a revenue increase of 7%. Park revenue increased from $5,010 million to $5,384 million.
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This year has not looked great for the Walt Disney Company’s stock prices, but hopefully, these are more promising results that can help turn things around for the company. Those are the key updates from the results but we will continue to update this post with more details. Check back for updates!
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Wish all the revenue would translate to stock holders like me who have lost over 50% of Disney stock value!