The Disney rally continues.
Stock of the Walt Disney Company closed Friday at a record $175.72, growing $21.03 per share or +13.59%. The surge started on Thursday evening, as soon as Disney unveiled some impressive streaming-subscriber numbers. The company later laid out very optimistic guidance for its future, and as a result, the momentum on Wall Street did not slow down all the way through Friday.
At its Friday peak, Disney stock knocked on the door of $180 per share.
Disney’s market cap is now north of $318 billion, leaving Netflix’s $222 billion looking like chump change. (OK, maybe not.) Market capitalization is the total dollar value of a company’s outstanding shares of stock in the market.
Yes, Wall Street was pretty impressed by the company’s streaming-subscriber updates — and all of those other many, many announcements — and no one seems all that concerned about increasing prices.
While the valuation is soaring, so is the spending. Disney+ spent about $2 billion on content in 2020, according to CFO Christine M. McCarthy. The company now forecasts that content spend to grow to between “$8 and $9 billion” in 2024, she said — especially with the inclusion of the streaming service’s sixth brand, Star, which will have a giant international presence.
The previous guidance for that year’s content-spend was about half of the new high end.
Disney+, which launched in November 2019, expects to hit peak losses next year and be profitable in fiscal 2024, the company’s chief financial officer said.
As of Dec. 2, Disney+ had 86.8 million subscribers. The company expects that number to skyrocket to a global paid total of 230-260 million by the end of fiscal 2024.
That made everyone seem to forget about that whole our-parks-are-mostly-closed-due-to-coronavirus thing, just as the Bobs — CEO Chapek and Chairman Iger (pictured above) — planned.
See a snapshot of Disney’s trading day below. We went with a five-day look to best emphasize the giant jump.
