Disney at 100
The business news that matters
Hello and welcome to the latest edition of Off to Lunch…
The Walt Disney Company is celebrating its 100th birthday today. Disney’s centenary provides the opportunity to celebrate the company’s films, but it is also an opportunity to look at the business itself and how it has not just survived but thrived in a fast-changing industry for so long.
The Walt Disney Company was founded by Walt Disney and his brother Roy on 16 October 1923 as the Disney Brothers Cartoon Studio. They founded the business after a distributor agreed to broadcast a collection of films that Walt Disney had made called the Alice Comedies. Four years later, Walt Disney launched a cartoon character called Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. However, Disney’s distributor owned the rights to the character and then signed up many of the company’s employees to make the cartoon at a lower cost, betraying the Disney brothers. This prompted Walt Disney to rethink the business, such as ensuring that Disney would always own the content it made and the characters it created in the future. In 1928 Disney launched Steamboat Willie, a cartoon featuring Mickey Mouse, and the foundations of the company were set…
You can find out more about the company’s history by visiting its official archives here
Disney is valued at more than $150 billion (£123 billion) on the stock market today. The graph below from Google Finance shows how Disney shares have performed…
Walt Disney himself died in 1966. The Guardian published a profile of him over the weekend and looked at what he was like as a chief executive. Disney had a “maniacal obsession” about even the smallest details, the feature says, such as how the company’s offices were built at a diagonal angle to the offices next door to ensure that its animators had the best light to work in. You can read that piece here
The company faces a collection of big challenges at present, including how to compete against streaming services like Netflix without costs spiralling out of control, how to deal with a strike by actors and writers, and how to find success at the box office after a string of flops. Bloomberg has done a big feature on the questions facing Bob Iger, the chief executive, as Disney celebrates its centenary. Sources close to Iger say in the piece that he is “overwhelmed and exhausted”. Shares in Disney are at the lowest price in a decade.
You can read the Bloomberg feature here. I also recommend a piece by the Financial Times on Lego and how the Danish company, which was founded in 1932, now sees itself as a modern rival to Disney after enjoying extraordinary success over the last decade, including with its own films and theme parks. Niels Christiansen, Lego’s chief executive, says in the piece: “We have to look at ourselves as an entertainment brand. Our brand characteristics are much more like Disney, the brand strengths are much more like Disney than any more traditional toy competitor.” You can read the feature here
Other stories that matter…
1. Manchester-based developer Bruntwood has raised £500 million for its SciTech venture, which is building science and technology campuses, lab space and city centre innovation hubs in Manchester, Cheshire, Birmingham, Leeds, Liverpool, Glasgow and Cambridge. Bruntwood SciTech has raised funds from its existing shareholders - Bruntwood and Legal & General - but also secured £150 million from the Greater Manchester Pension Fund (GMPF). Bruntwood said that the GMPF is “the first local government pension scheme to make a direct and active investment into a UK-wide science, tech and innovation specialist property platform”. You can find the statement from Bruntwood SciTech here.
2. Meanwhile, Edinburgh-based investor Par Equity has raised £67 million to invest in start-ups in Scotland, Northern Ireland and northern England. Story by Sifted here
3. The ratings being used to judge the ESG performance of a company are “pretty useless”, according to the latest newsletter by City analyst Joachim Klement. “Investors who try to optimise portfolios along these dozens of ESG components simultaneously can end up with a portfolio that is in some ways worse than doing nothing at all,” he writes. Piece here
4. The Financial Times has a fascinating interview with Thomas Heatherwick, the designer and architect, about how he has honed his craft and why he is frustrated with modern buildings. “If a workspace doesn’t connect with a team, they’re more likely to call in sick and say: ‘Can I work from home?’,” he says “Think how many thousands of plants have been bought in the last couple of years to try and make workspaces softer.” You can read the interview here
5. New research suggests that former college athletes in the US earn more money in the labour market than non-athletes. These former athletes are people who went through the college sports system but didn’t make it to professional sport when they graduated. Why did they succeed in business? According to economist Tyler Cowen in his latest column for Bloomberg, the research suggests that sport improves key skills like leadership, problem-solving and the ability to work with others. Column here
And finally…
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Best
Graham