To say they could be sued or the SEC would be after them is silly. Beyond silly. Revenue is up. So, what shareholder or Fed cares? Unless the did something illegal to get the higher number and that's not what we're talking about here. They could have said it was caused by economic indicators, better weather, higher spend due to higher guest confidence, NexGen, Santa Claus, whatever It's a
few percentage points. The analysts know the game
This is a circular argument with no way of quantifying the Staggs/Iger/Rasulo's argument - until
they do.
And that's the main point to take away from all of this - they could but they didn't.
So, what we can do is put it in context:
We're only talking about a few percentage points (3.6%) for one fiscal quarter compared to the previous year's: Attendance up 7%, Revenue up 10.6% in the last announcement so....
If we find out that tourism spending nationally or in Fla is up 3-4% for this year (and it will be up due to eco and confidence, guaranteed) Hmmm what caused the gain? But you see, we and they don't know that figure yet, so they can say anything.
Within that 3.6% we also need to take into account all of the other things they stated as causes for that increase: higher ticket prices (5-20% across the board depending on type) and food bev price increases. What MM+ could contribute is now getting even smaller
They've stated that they're still not close to full adoption of MM+/MB's (last I heard them state was still in the 50% range), so how much could it really impact?
Comcast reported Theme Park Rev up 29.9%, and cash flow up 37.6% for their last Q increasing pressure on Disney to report something/anything they are proactively doing is causing rev to increase
They've tossed another 800 mil into the Shanghai Project and need to show confidence that they can do that because they are making more money elsewhere in P&R above basic eco trends
And maybe the biggest thing to take from it? - None of those follow-on, one-on-one analyst q&a's where they specifically point out how MM+ increased spending. Where they say things like "Taking out what we estimate as an x% increase due to higher consumer confidence we saw an additional y% of spending due to MM+ and a z% increase in occupancy due to MM+.
You see, at some point next year after the 10K they are going to need to do that. They made a 1.5 - 2 bil investment in MM+. Down the road, they're going to have to quantify it's positive impact to rev and profit to the analysts and shareholders. But the analysts, BoD and big shareholders also know it's a marathon, not a sprint. Until they can show it FY to FY and not just the sprint of Q to Q, the data, enough data, isn't there.
Nobody's going to call them on their statement for one quarter, it would be silly. Rev is still increasing within decent parameters. Next Dec/Jan, with more comparable data from Disney, competitors, the economy, etc., will give a better picture. If MM+ adoption is below 75%, or the attrib of rev increase is small single digits, that's a prob against that size of investment....
