Walt Disney Co lowered profit guidance for its cable networks unit and reported quarterly revenue slightly below Wall Street forecasts, sending its shares down six per cent on Tuesday. Investors are getting ready for updates on the company’s five business segments, including media networks, parks and resorts, studio entertainment, consumer products, and interactive media. The brokerage presently has an “outperform” rating on the entertainment giant’s stock. Disney did not disclose how much money it lost on “Tomorrowland”, which was released May 22 and has taken in $208 million at the box office. Furthermore, the analyst emphasized that Disney remains a “clear” outperformer in home entertainment and TV licensing performance. Disney, headquartered in Burbank, Calif., has a strong pipeline of movies heading into theaters in the months and quarters ahead – not the least of which is Star Wars Episode VII – The Force Awakens, due to premiere at the end of the year. Overall, the company produced “a good solid quarter”. Disney Consumer Products (DCP) delivers product encounters across thousands of categories from toys and clothing to books and fine art. Disney Interactive is a creator of interactive entertainment across all present and emerging digital media platforms. This represents a yield of 1.15%. Eight analysts have rated the stock with a hold rating and twenty-three have given a buy rating to the company. And earnings totaled a record $2.5 billion, or $1.45 per share, up from $2.2 billion, or $1.28 per share, in the year-ago period. “It’s been a bad idea to have second-guessed [Disney CEO] Bob Iger on the M&A front for the past decade”. Disney has beaten earnings in 10 straight quarters.
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The stock price of The Walt Disney Company skyrocketed 49.44% over the last 200 days, and is in reinforcing up trend. Disney reports quarterly financial results on Tuesday, August 4, 2015.
Movie moves: Despite releasing “Tomorrowland”, a George Clooney film that performed poorly, the studio division had a profitable quarter. The average estimate of 10 analysts surveyed by Zacks Investment Research was for earnings of $1.39 per share.
The company said a “modest” decrease in ESPN subscribers would trim a few percentage points off a forecast for profit growth from domestic subscriber fees from 2013 to 2016. But you would be hard-pressed to find a hotter company, one that is pushing all the right buttons at the right time, culminating in three-year stock gains of nearly 140%.
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Douglas Mitchelson has rated Disney three times since 2009, earning an 100% success rate recommending the stock and a +23.8% average return per DIS recommendation when measured over a one-year horizon and no benchmark. Post opening the session at $120.12, the shares hit an intraday low of $119.5994 and an intraday high of $120.72 and the price vacillated in this range throughout the day. Janedis increased his full-year EPS estimate by $0.07 to $5.17 due to assumptions that “some of the beat in F2Q is offset by a tough comp in ESPN affiliate deferral revenue in F3Q”. This is down from average of 6.20 million shares. Finally, Topeka Capital Markets raised shares of Walt Disney from a “hold” rating to a “buy” rating and lifted their price target for the company from $105.00 to $138.00 in a report on Friday, July 24th. Revenue rose to US$13.10 billion from US$12.47 billion.
