The Walt Disney Company (NYSE:DIS) Q1 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Bob Iger: Thank you, Phil. We are fairly certain that when we created the structure and broke ESPN out on its own that it would lead to questions like this. We did not do it for that purpose actually. ESPN is a differentiator for this company. It’s the best sports brand in television. It’s one of the best sports brand in sports. It continues to create real value for us. It is going through some, obviously, challenging times because of what’s happened in linear programming. But the brand of ESPN is very healthy, and the programming of ESPN is very healthy. We just have to figure out how to monetize it in disrupting and a continuing or disrupting world. That’s it. But we are not engaged in any conversations right now or considering a spin-off of ESPN. That had been done, by the way, in my absence. And I am told the company concluded after exploring it very carefully that it wasn’t something the company wanted to do.

Alexia Quadrani: Thank you. Next question.

Operator: Our next question today comes from Doug Mitchelson with Credit Suisse. Please go ahead.

Doug Mitchelson: Thanks so much. Welcome Bob €“ my welcome back, Bob come in. Bob, there is some investor skepticism that theme park per caps and margins are elevated due to post-pandemic benefits that might expire. I am curious, in your view, does the theme park division still have healthy growth prospects from here, especially after a pretty good quarter, this quarter. And what do you see as the major growth drivers of theme parks going forward? Thanks.

Bob Iger: Nice to hear your voice again, Doug. We have been through many of these calls in the past. Well, the answer is yes on the theme parks in terms of their growth. I am very, very bullish about our parks and not just because of the COVID recovery. But to start with, demand on the parks is extraordinary right now. Now, we could lean into that demand easily by letting more people in and by more aggressively pricing. We don’t think either would be smart, because we let more people in is going to reduce guest experience. That’s certainly not what we want. And in fact, if you looked at our results this past holiday season, we actually reduced capacity certainly improved guest experience, and we are able to maintain profit, not just profitability, but a very, very successful or robust bottom line.

We are going to continue to look at opportunities like that, which is essentially to simply get more creative in terms of managing the capacity that we have. I am going to come back to that in terms of growth, but let me also address the pricing side. It’s clear that some of our pricing initiatives were alienating to consumers. I have always believed by the way, that accessibility is a core value of the Disney brand. We were not perceived to be as accessible or as affordable to many segments as we probably should have been. So, after basically paying heat to what we were hearing, we started to address it. And the steps that we took were actually were very, very positive. We got really great reaction to it. In addition, and it’s tied to this is that we have put in place just basically more flexibility for the consumer in terms of how much it cost them to go.