Disney is planning to lay off 7,000 workers worldwide in order to cut down costs in the company. CEO Bob Iger announced the layoffs during an earning call by stating the layoff were necessary “to address the challenges we’re facing today”. Disney follows the likes of Mircosoft, Amazon and other tech companies who have retrenched workers this year amid the global economic crisis.
Iger says that $5.5 billion has to be saved across the company and the layoffs will help make this happen. However, at the time, he didn’t confirm which departments are affected by these layoffs.
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Regardless of these layoffs, Disney+ has just added 200,000 subscribers to the service in the US and Canada. A further 1.2 million members were added to the service in other regions including EMEA (excluding Hotstar in certain countries). The addition of ESPN and Hulu also saw growth across these numbers by 800,000 and 600,000 respectively.
The current Disney+ subscription service is sitting at 46.6 million subscribers in total. Its recent earnings call revealed a 13% increase in its revenue to $5.3 billion in its direct-to-consumer division. However, Disney did report an operating loss of $1.1 billion. The streaming division reported a loss of $1.5 billion last quarter.
“Our priority is the enduring growth and profitability of our streaming business. Our current forecasts indicate Disney Plus will hit profitability by the end of fiscal 2024, and achieving that remains our goal.”
Disney plans on launching a new ad tier subscription soon. However, the company claims that it won’t provide any meaningful impact on the current financials until much later this year.
Disney+ has been around for almost a year in South Africa. While multiple regions have seen a price hike, new launch regions such as SA have yet to be affected by a price increase. But with the current losses at Disney, it will likely happen soon.
Source: Reuters
