Disney has announced its quarterly figures: Group profits have halved, but the streaming business is still going well.
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Disney profits cut in half – Disney+ is doing great
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Compared to the same quarter last year, profits at Disney fell by around half to around 470 million US dollars. However, the group continues to grow, and Disney + in particular has gained millions of new subscribers. The information comes from the Group’s quarterly report.
According to Disney, higher costs for production, advertising and technology are mainly responsible for the drop in profits. A lot of money was also spent in order to be able to trigger a license from a previous partner early. The group did not go into detail as to which rights it was exactly, but the Marvel series that were shown on Netflix are speculated.
Disney’s streaming business is on track
However, the important streaming business performed better than expected. The Disney+ streaming service added 7.9 million subscribers in the quarter and had about 137.7 million paying customers at the end of the quarter, beating all forecasts. And the Hulu and ESPN+ services were also doing well; If you add the subscribers to these services, Disney has already surpassed the 200 million subscriber barrier and stands at almost 206 million customers.
For comparison: Streaming rival Netflix had around 222 million customers at the end of the quarter, but also had to announce falling subscription numbers for the first time in over 10 years. You can read more about this in our article here:
Disney is also benefiting from the improvement in the pandemic situation. Revenue from resorts and theme parks increased 23 percent to $19.2 billion.
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