Disney Stock Soars to All-Time High and Record $300 Billion Market Cap After Epic Investor Day
Good morning, Disney shareholders. Emphasis on the “good.” As the U.S. stock markets woke up on Friday, shares of The Walt Disney Company (DIS) opened around $170 per share, setting a new all-time high.
Disney’s market cap, which as the markets opened flirted with numbers as high as $309 billion, is now more than $300 billion for the first time ever. For a comparison you’re probably wondering about, Netflix’s market cap is about $219 billion.
Market capitalization is the total dollar value of a company’s outstanding shares of stock in the market.
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So 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.
Disney’s stock price closed Thursday at 4 p.m. ET at $154.69 per share. It is now up double digits on a percentage basis from that.
The stock first popped after-hours and very early on into the company’s four-plus-hour Investor Day 2020, when the Disney+ subscriber count was announced. Momentum continued throughout the evening and into this morning.
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The valuation is certainly soaring — but 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.
*Also Read:* Here's Everything Disney Just Announced During Massive Investor Day Presentation
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.
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