Disney’s Theme Parks and Consumer Products in 2017

The Walt Disney Company’s (DIS) parks and resorts are doing extremely well in the United States. The company is continuing to add new attractions. Last year, it announced that it’s looking to add two more cruise ships to its fleet, taking the number to six. However, it doesn’t expect them to be operational until 2021–2023.

Disney has also introduced three-tier pricing at its US theme parks to increase revenue. It said in its fiscal 2016 earnings call that it has seen such high occupancy at its hotels in Orlando and California that it’s thinking about building more hotels at both sites. However, it made no new announcements in its fiscal 4Q16 earnings call.

As you can see in the above graph, Disney Parks and Resorts accounted for 31.0% of the company’s total revenues of $55.6 billion in fiscal 2016.

Last year, Disney opened its Disneyland theme park in Shanghai, China (FXI). The company stated in its fiscal 4Q16 earnings call that it expects Shanghai Disneyland to be close to profitable in fiscal 2017.

Disney said that Shanghai Disneyland had 4.0 million visitors in the first four months after its launch. But it didn’t provide any annual guidance for the number of visitors to the theme park. Considering the rising visitors, it could be inferred that there’s a possibility that Shanghai Disneyland could attract around 10.0 million visitors in its first year of operation.

Disney (DIS) said in its fiscal 4Q16 earnings call that in fiscal 1Q17, it expects operating income for Disney Consumer Products and Interactive Media to fall year-over-year about 20.0%. The fall is due to a difficult comparison in licensing its Star Wars and Frozen merchandise and licensing its Star Wars Battlefront game in fiscal 1Q16.