Disney Company will have a webcast at 4:30 PM (after the stock market closes) to release its 4th Quarter and Full Year-End Financial results.
Often these webcasts also give insight into future plans for the various divisions of the Disney Company. Let’s see what might be in store for the parks.
I would like to watch it myself, but today is my daughter’s 16th birthday and she gets home from school a half-hour before the webcast starts. She gets my full attention this afternoon.
Maybe someone might be interested in watching and sharing the news.
A really good example is that I work at FPP (Family Physicians of Pembroke). All of the practices are spoken of in shorthand. It seemed a bit of kismet when I was going through the hiring process and onboarding and realized that
Im just expecting all bad news about the parks. The pessimism in me is rising. Probably because I leave tomorrow and i am so worried it’s going to be awful! Because I know that if it’s awful my husband will never want to go back and that would ruuuuuin me. Baseless fears, I’m sure. Right? Right?!
Now, I don’t think it will be awful. It will, however, be different, and whether that different is enough to convince your husband of the magic is hard to say. I know when we were there in August, I was nervous because our DIL had never been to Disney before. A lot of the things that make it magical were missing, and so I wasn’t sure if she could come away from the trip going, “Uh…so that’s what all the fuss is about?”
I don’t think any park-related news revealed on this call will be “bad” to parks enthusiasts like us or “news” to parks enthusiasts like us.
There will be talk of things we already know about and thus aren’t news to us–layoffs; cancellations; delays in construction timelines; the scaling back of x, y, or z. There will be talk of things that I don’t think is necessarily bad news to folks like us–low attendance figures mean shorter waits and lower room rates, for example.
I expect that there will be some figures and stats we might not already know, but could reasonably estimate (such as capacity figures and how ticket/room sales are going for 2021 so far). I anticipate we’ll get more talk from the suits about how ready they are to open DLR, but we’re not going to get even a rough timeline on that today.
I love these investor calls because I’m a finance and numbers nerd, but I don’t think there will be bombshell parks news on this call.
I am not anticipating any big new block buster news but I would guess that some time tables for things like various projects in progress, 50th anniversary celebration, estimated opening dates would be presented. Investors are going to want to know that money already spent will not be going to waste.
The Star Wars hotel will be mentioned, I’m sure, maybe an opening date, work continues and that is going to be a good revenue producer.
Since Disney+ is the shining star of the company, most of the focus will be on that segment of they company.
Hopefully, the loss from Parks, Experiences and Products will be less than the $2 Billion loss in the third quarter…
I guess no other nuggets of information/updates were released? I did think I read where they are going to increase to 35% capacity. Wondering how they are going to do that, really – hoping they are increasing their cast member staffing base?
I’ve been thinking about this. I can only presume that they are increasing capacity in small, incremental ways.
We know that ride vehicles are being modified so that they can put more people on them (ROTR, MMRR, FEA, etc).
We also see that more and more food places are opening up, including during the weekdays.
Aside from this, though…what else?
I recall seeing a post about how Casey’s Corner is now being overtaken by merchandise…basically extending the Emporium. Presumably this will allow more people in the shop at a time.
Still, an extra 10% is a huge number of people. If MK was set to 20 to 25,000 people at 25%, we’re talking potentially an extra 10,000 people!
Of course, I get that Disney needs more people coming to the parks and resorts to drive up revenues…but I’m struggling to believe the changes they are doing now will be able to accommodate this level of increase.
