DIS Shareholders and Stock Info ONLY

[HokieRaven5]

And by the way, I am very much a free market capitalist and believe CEO's should get what they are worth and what the market demands but, while our CEO's have been paid hundreds of millions the last 10 years, shareholders have been paid exactly nothing. Now I suppose we could be WBD where our "nothing" is still a lot better than minus 70% but it is still painful for us longtime holders.

And in stock price news, Rich Greenfield on Yahoo Finance, just pointed out that 10 years ago today Disney also announced Q3 earnings - the stock price at that time is the same as today, $115. Compare to the S&P up 205% and the Nasdaq up 320%, DIS 0%. If I put all my DIS monies in an S&P fund back then, retirement would have been significantly closer than it is for me...

Comcast can say the same exact story. For better or worse, Wall Street has lumped the two together.

 

[Obi-J Kenobi]

What exactly is the complacency in this contect?

Dream big, Never miss an angle. Don't forget what brought your customers to your product originally.

If you think that the current Disney creatives (Studios, Parks, etc.) and leadership "suits" are incorporating these three things, then respectfully, you and I are going to agree to disagree.

 

[BrianL]

Dream big, Never miss an angle. Don't forget what brought your customers to your product originally.

If you think that the current Disney creatives (Studios, Parks, etc.) and leadership "suits" are incorporating these three things, then respectfully, you and I are going to agree to disagree.

They do ocassionally - and every time they do they get raked financially for it. All of their creative and original fare seems to fail. The endless rehashes and IP seem to work. So, that's what they are providing - they aren't missing that angle!

 

[RivShore]

Comcast can say the same exact story. For better or worse, Wall Street has lumped the two together.

True, it is somewhat an industry problem but at least Comcast is up a bit over the last decade and pays a 4%+ dividend and when you consider how much of their business depends on "old" cable, i guess it could be argued that they have held up better than DIS.

 

[RivShore]

Dream big, Never miss an angle. Don't forget what brought your customers to your product originally.

If you think that the current Disney creatives (Studios, Parks, etc.) and leadership "suits" are incorporating these three things, then respectfully, you and I are going to agree to disagree.

Agree somewhat on the Studios side but you lump WDW parks into that? With all the expansions and improvements starting with new Fantasy Land, all the detail built into Pandora and GE, The fan favorites in TS Land? Non of that is good enough?

 

[HokieRaven5]

True, it is somewhat an industry problem but at least Comcast is up a bit over the last decade and pays a 4%+ dividend and when you consider how much of their business depends on "old" cable, i guess it could be argued that they have held up better than DIS.

CMCSA August 5, 2015 - $29.91
CMCSA August 5, 2025 - $32.51

A few days prior on Aug 3, 2015 it traded at $31.61

 

[RivShore]

CMCSA August 5, 2015 - $29.91
CMCSA August 5, 2025 - $32.51

A few days prior on Aug 3, 2015 it traded at $31.61

I have always considered Comcast a slow growth utility type stock that doesn't move much but pays a decent dividend, while Disney has had much higher aspirations - see the short lived D+ stock boom when both Iger and Chapek were arguing that Disney deserved Netflix/Tech type multiples...yet here we are, basically matching a utility over the last decade.

 

[HokieRaven5]

I have always considered Comcast a slow growth utility type stock that doesn't move much but pays a decent dividend, while Disney has had much higher aspirations - see the short lived D+ stock boom when both Iger and Chapek were arguing that Disney deserved Netflix/Tech type multiples...yet here we are, basically matching a utility over the last decade.

I mean, really outside of maybe a decade (2008-2018), Disney has been more like Comcast than anything else as far as Wall Street.

Then the whole D+ reaction by Wall Street and now it has plateaued again.

 

[RivShore]

I mean, really outside of maybe a decade (2008-2018), Disney has been more like Comcast than anything else as far as Wall Street.

Then the whole D+ reaction by Wall Street and now it has plateaued again.

But should it be valued like a utility? I think it points to problems within the company/c suite that with a high growth/margin Experience business and a now successful streaming business, it can't do better than a utility when it comes to stock performance (and actually significantly worse when you take dividends into account).

 

[HokieRaven5]

But should it be valued like a utility? I think it points to problems within the company/c suite that with a high growth/margin Experience business and a now successful streaming business, it can't do better than a utility when it comes to stock performance (and actually significantly worse when you take dividends into account).

That’s a question for Wall Street and those investors who are the drivers.

ETA: I don’t think it should be, but I’m not an institutional investment firm that has more control over something like $Dis, retail/public investors aren’t pouncing on it

 

[HokieRaven5]

That’s a question for Wall Street and those investors who are the drivers.

ETA: I don’t think it should be, but I’m not an institutional investment firm that has more control over something like $Dis, retail/public investors aren’t pouncing on it

The rolling 4Q OI for Entertainment is the highest it has been since Q3FY20-Q2FY21, the rolling 4Q OI for Experiences is again at a record high.

And yet, Wall Street just doesn’t care where $Dis is going financially.

 

[clarker99]

Ignore the noise. $Dis is as healthy it has ever been. Stock price is baffling to me as the KPI’s are all pointed n the right direction.

 

[HokieRaven5]

View attachment 991275
View attachment 991280
Ignore the noise. $Dis is as healthy it has ever been. Stock price is baffling to me as the KPI’s are all pointed n the right direction.

Just once again reiterates the point that stock price doesn’t tell the whole story about a company’s financials.

It’s A story, but not the entire picture.

 

[RivShore]

View attachment 991275
View attachment 991280
Ignore the noise. $Dis is as healthy it has ever been. Stock price is baffling to me as the KPI’s are all pointed n the right direction.

Oh master of all DIS charts, do you have one for PE over time? Curious to see how the street has valued those bottom line dollars pre and post covid. Thanks!

 

[HokieRaven5]

Rolling 4Q OI from @clarker99


P/E over same period


Stock peaked 3 months before the June 2021 earnings with that high P/E

 

[wabbott]

https://www.wsj.com/business/media/...gure-out-streaming-f24a32b1?mod=hp_lead_pos11

Disney’s Thriving Parks Are Buying It Time to Figure Out Streaming
Parks and cruises are helping, but company-wide profit margins are still well below the cable bundle’s heyday

By Dan Gallagher and Ben Fritz
Aug. 7, 2025 - 5:30 am EDT

Disney was once a giant media company that also happened to own some theme parks. The new Disney is quickly turning into the opposite.

The company’s latest quarterly report Wednesday drove that point home even further. Disney’s revenue and operating income were roughly in line with Wall Street’s estimates despite weaker-than-expected revenue growth at its entertainment and sports divisions. The main source of strength was domestic parks, which saw revenue jump 10% from a year earlier to $6.4 billion and operating income surge 22% to nearly $1.7 billion.

Both exceeded analysts’ targets during a quarter in which Disney saw the launch of a major new competitor: Universal’s new Epic Universe theme park in Orlando, Fla. Disney said Wednesday that its Walt Disney World park in the same city saw record revenue for the June-ending quarter.

Theme parks include Disney’s fast-growing cruise-ship business, which will get two new vessels later this year. The costs for those launches will weigh on the division’s bottom line a bit. And the company’s international parks unit saw operating income drop 3% year-over-year to $422 million, which the company blamed in part on weak spending at its two parks in China.

Still, the long-term resilience of the theme-parks business against new competition, weakened consumer spending, global trade tensions and even a worldwide pandemic has been remarkable. And it has saved Disney from much of the pain being experienced by rival media companies grappling with the meltdown of the traditional cable-TV business and a theatrical market still well off its prepandemic highs.

But those are still problems for Disney too. The cable-TV shrinkage in particular has left a rather large gap on the company’s income statement. Annual operating income for linear networks is down by more than a billion dollars in just the past two years.

Theme parks have offset some of that loss. Domestic and international parks now account for 43% of Disney’s annual operating income compared with 21% a decade ago. But Disney’s overall operating margin is now around 19%—nearly 10 points below its level from a decade ago. That reflects both the loss in linear TV profits and the addition of streaming revenue that currently brings in much lower margins.

As a result, Disney’s operating profit last year was $15.6 billion—very close to the $15.7 billion peak all the way back in fiscal 2016. But that past record was on $55.6 billion in total annual revenue, which is now above $90 billion.

Streaming margins will likely improve. They need to. That business generated $346 million of operating income on $6.2 billion of revenue last quarter, a margin of nearly 6%. Disney has said it would increase that to 10% and then wants to take it higher.

Getting there will require different strategies domestically and abroad. In the U.S., where subscriber growth has plateaued, Disney wants to reduce churn by convincing people to subscribe to all three of its streaming services, making it likely they will watch more stuff and won’t cancel. That is why it costs so little to add Hulu and the soon-to-launch ESPN streaming service once you’ve got Disney+, and vice versa.

Overseas, Disney is investing in local streaming content, at least in certain markets. It is also trying to improve its recommendation algorithm, which is currently no match for Netflix’s, particularly when it comes to the Hulu and ESPN content that bundle subscribers can watch on Disney+.

Those are the right moves to be making. And the potential for streaming to boost Disney’s bottom line is there. Netflix is now generating an annual operating margin around 30%. But that is after nearly two decades in streaming and off a base of more than 300 million paying subscribers, which is nearly 100 million more than the total number of Disney+, Hulu and ESPN subscriptions that Disney now reports.

Disney, in other words, still has a lot of catching up to do in the streaming race. Its parks and cruise ships are making that ride a bit easier.

Write to Dan Gallagher at dan.gallagher@wsj.com and Ben Fritz at ben.fritz@wsj.com