Welcome to a special lunchtime Wakeup #medianerd🤓 edition, looking at the final quarter of the Iger era, as Josh D’Amaro takes the mic in front of the Wall Street crowd.
The CEO appointment years in the making finally met The Street this morning . . . with D’Amaro at the reins of his first DISNEY earnings call, along with seasoned pro CFO Hugh Johnston and new head of Investor Relations (and former Wall Street analyst who used to ask questions on this call) Ben Swinburne.
So — what did Josh have in store? A new banger list of content announcements? A new big IP acquisition? Yeah, not so much.
This is not The D’Amaro Way – in fact, management opened by saying they plan to keep comments brief on future calls #goodtimes.
DISNEY is also copying NETFLIX by no longer allowing Wall Street analysts to ask questions themselves on the calls . . . and instead, chooses to have Swinburne ask pre-submitted questions from analysts. #boring
Basically, you could totally see DISNEY being the first to shift to half-year reports instead of quarterly reports should the new SEC proposal allowing such behavior come to fruition.
Josh did lay out 3 main long-term things to emphasize — outside of delivering the already stated shorter-term 💰 guidance (enjoy your $8B of stock buybacks this year!):
- Creativity investment (uh, yeah — keep makin’ bangers, yo)
- Build out this DISNEY+ as a “super app” idea . . . a notion that both Iger and Chapek championed but never delivered in their eras (more on this below).
- Invest in tech to lower costs. #thx #AI
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