ForceofWill
Mouseketeer
- Joined
- Feb 19, 2020
From the recent earnings call:
Christine McCarthy -- Senior Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer
OK. And before I talk about capex, I just want to say, from my perspective, the Parks management team has done an outstanding job addressing cost structure. Of course, variable costs will come back in as we ramp up operations, but they've really looked at the way they're doing business, and it's really been quite impressive. So I just want to add that to what Bob has already said.
As it relates to capex, last earnings call, we had said that we expected capex to be up from last year. I think the number was 550 million. But now, we're expecting it to be relatively flat. What we have here is a couple of dynamics.
We'll have increased spending at DMED and corporate, but we're going to have reduced spending at Parks. Some of the DMED spending is going to be on things like technology, in infrastructure investments related to the launch of Star, and DPEP at our parks business. Obviously, the reason that the capex is slowing is because some of the parks are closed, and we've chosen to slow spending there.
So I see the qualifier at the end of her statement there but I just don't know how much I believe it. Anyone else feel Chapek is using all this as an excuse to cut funding to the parks and move it towards all their streaming/media side of the business? We're already seeing it with Magical Express, EMH and such, none of which have anything to do with spending at parks that are closed.
Christine McCarthy -- Senior Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer
OK. And before I talk about capex, I just want to say, from my perspective, the Parks management team has done an outstanding job addressing cost structure. Of course, variable costs will come back in as we ramp up operations, but they've really looked at the way they're doing business, and it's really been quite impressive. So I just want to add that to what Bob has already said.
As it relates to capex, last earnings call, we had said that we expected capex to be up from last year. I think the number was 550 million. But now, we're expecting it to be relatively flat. What we have here is a couple of dynamics.
We'll have increased spending at DMED and corporate, but we're going to have reduced spending at Parks. Some of the DMED spending is going to be on things like technology, in infrastructure investments related to the launch of Star, and DPEP at our parks business. Obviously, the reason that the capex is slowing is because some of the parks are closed, and we've chosen to slow spending there.
So I see the qualifier at the end of her statement there but I just don't know how much I believe it. Anyone else feel Chapek is using all this as an excuse to cut funding to the parks and move it towards all their streaming/media side of the business? We're already seeing it with Magical Express, EMH and such, none of which have anything to do with spending at parks that are closed.