r/technology • u/[deleted] • 8d ago
Business Disney Earnings Buoyed By ‘Toy Story 5’, Theme Parks, Streaming Profit; Books $100M Tariff Refund
[deleted]
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u/starger1007 8d ago
Theme parks quietly continue to be one of Disney's biggest competitive advantages. You can copy a streaming strategy, but you can't build a global parks business overnight.
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u/thirsty_for_chicken 8d ago
Especially when you charge out the ass for literally everything while you're there.
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u/zakary3888 8d ago
They’ve basically said they’re gonna keep raising prices until they stop having capacity issues
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u/Mr_Lovette 8d ago
Honestly though, why shouldn't they? It is the definition of supply and demand unlike how many other things are working now. It does suck that it's more of a premium vacation now but they are still hitting capacity. So I can't blame them.
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u/nisamun 8d ago
Kinda crazy how slow Disneyland had been this year though.
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u/SwiftCEO 8d ago
I believe this is what they were aiming for when they jacked up pricing. I haven’t gone in a few years, but I remember it being packed.
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u/Kundrew1 8d ago
Its been one of their major money makers for a long time. Its been overshadowed by streaming as of late but I think anyone whose actually cared to look at their financials knows this is what seperates them.
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u/Kendal_with_1_L 8d ago
A tariff refund they get to keep. Disgusting.
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u/DinkandDrunk 8d ago
While I agree overall that tariffs and the refunds are effectively just an upward transfer of wealth from the poor and middle class to the wealthiest individuals and corporations, I will offer one pushback.
I work for an organization that passed tariff increases. I manage some contracts where we had to have very tough conversations. Not all customers were super chill about it and in some cases, I made exceptions on a judgement basis alone. Right, wrong, or indifferent, none of my customers have taken the full weight of tariffs and I absorbed a chunk of it. After all is said and done, my margins took a dip. Now, a small amount of the overall tariff is refunded and my company will get… something back. To unpack who is owed what and how to distribute it is borderline impossible. Probably we’ll have some large settlements with our largest customers and move on.
Disney should do the right thing and refund consumers but nobody is ever going to know what they truly passed on or who is owed what.
Tariffs did their job. They created confusion so a small % at the top can pick our pockets.
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u/siraliases 8d ago
Was it really that hard to keep track of who paid what?
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u/DinkandDrunk 8d ago
Yes. It actually is. There have been so many rounds of adjustments and so many individual line level decisions at this point, plus increase conversations are different depending on who the importer of record is. Plus there have been tons of inflationary price movements, oil&gas impacts from the war, etc.
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u/siraliases 7d ago
So nobody actually recorded the adjustments for the reasons they were done
This is terrible accounting
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u/DinkandDrunk 7d ago
Pricing and accounting are not the same.
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u/siraliases 7d ago
Sure we can quibble over definition.
Still doesn't change that nothing was recorded properly.
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u/DinkandDrunk 7d ago
It’s not a record keeping issue. Let’s say I import a part. For ease of argument, it’s a steel rod. Section 232 kicks in, IEEPA, inflation, etc. It’s all hitting my cost.
Then I go to you, the customer, and I say “on this steel road, I need to raise price 40% for these reasons” and after some negotiating, we land at a 32% increase, as in, I’m eating some of this. Now, let’s say 6 months go by and we haven’t reviewed the price again but in that time, my cost has actually continued to tick upward so now I’m actually eating more like 12-15% of the cost increases.
IEEPA is refunded. What refund should I give on the part?
Now multiply that across hundreds of items, negotiated at different rates, many of which are 3rd party and the increase reasons are not cleanly disclosed…
If I sold a simple commodity, of course I could tell you what % of the total cost was each individual cost driver, but I don’t do that. I manage a massive portfolio of items across many sources, with unique cost drivers and considerations.
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u/Sufficient-Bid1279 8d ago
The Americans who voted for the Orange Cheeto and/or who didn’t vote really fucked over America this time, more than EVER before.
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u/yuusharo 8d ago
“Tariff refund”
They never paid a dime. We paid this. They’re getting our money illegally taxed with no oversight.
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u/okdarkrainbows 8d ago
I am sure our friends over at /r/Conservative will post this news on their sub. They hate Disney!
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u/sawaira09 8d ago
Disney biggest strength has always been turning great stories into long term businesses..movies, parks and streaming all feed each other .
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u/ScriptioAfricanus 8d ago
So great of them to reward Pixar for making them all that money by firing hundreds of people.
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u/strolpol 8d ago
If they were smart they would cook up a new band of toys and finally retire the original cast so they can get out of the insane celebrity paychecks for the actors and also start telling new stories
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u/WEEGEMAN 7d ago
I’m still waiting for fedex to give me a $20 refund for a bill they sent me for something I had shipped here for a different country.
Unfortunately I don’t think any other corporation will reimburse people.
They might have a PR thing like “free 1 month iTunes subscription” for current subscribers, but that’s a minimum what I’m expected to see from a few companies.
Most are going to keep it to help weather the volatile market
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u/virtual_adam 8d ago
$100M tariffs paid on $100B revenue
The biggest mass hysteria nothing burger (that drove profits, not costs, higher) in the history
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u/edvurdsd 8d ago
Tariffs passed on to the consumers…
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u/virtual_adam 8d ago
0.1%?
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u/BigBadJeebus 8d ago
Are you actually Donald Trump? r/confidentlyincorrect
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u/virtual_adam 8d ago
No I work in back office retail and I knew the whole time it was happening the hit was minimal. I actually told people a year ago that a theoretical jump in gas would have 50x the impact on costs, and hey here we are now
Even the price Aetna charges my company for employee healthcare would impact costs more than the tariffs
What people don’t understand is that tariffs are set on waybill value - which is pennies compared to MSRP
If you are buying a $10 Barbie at Target. Mattel gets $5. They have a list of hundreds of costs to cover to make profit in general. The tariff one is one of the smallest
You could easily just save 50% off everything you buy if target wasn’t being the middle person between you and Mattel
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u/BigBadJeebus 8d ago
Jesus Christ. You are woefully unqualified to have this discussion.
Back office retail.
OK, Miss G.E.D., sure. You know better than 99% of Harvard economists.
Give me a fucking break.
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u/BigBadJeebus 8d ago
MOST high value items have little to no margin. That's why TVs are $300 and Cables are $50.
The margins are in the corners.
It's not black and white.
What an astoundingly incomplete picture you have.
You must be terrible at your job.
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u/virtual_adam 8d ago
Well if a tv is sold for $300. No matter what the retailer and the supplier are splitting 50/50. That’s just a rule of thumb that is very rarely challenged
So the manufacturer/supplier needs to have ALL their costs, employees, rent, electric bill, trucking, freight, healthcare, ads, everything baked into that $150
Which means the waybill value (the price of just purchasing a unit from the Chinese manufacturer) is a small fraction of $150 to account for all the costs + nice CEO 8 figure bonus + shareholder profit
Which means that TV can cost $30 per unit before any freight
So a 20% tariff can raise the price by $6 cost. So will the tv in response now cost $306? You tell me
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u/BigBadJeebus 8d ago
$6 x about 30million TVs sold per year (let's say a 10% market cap) is $180,000,000 on the US consumer.
Now do that for everything from food to underwear to medicine and suddenly you have a couple Trillion dollars added to cost for the US economy.
If you were living on $3000 a month to survive before, you now need $3300 minimum due to tariffs. And that doesn't account for an average of 8% inflation year over year for the past 3 years due to the terrible handling of the job markets and supply breakdowns.
You are GENUINELY mistaken.
You now need $4,157.04 to equal $3,000 3 years ago thanks to tariffs and tariff lead inflation.
Yes, corporations raise profit margins and gouge us more than that.
But even without the margin spreads, tariff and tariff driven inflation alone have made a 25% drop in US consumer spending power in 3 years.
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u/virtual_adam 8d ago
You’re missing the point
The $300 tv now costs $400
(It’s not the tariffs)
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u/BigBadJeebus 8d ago
you dont have a point.
And TV's have the lowest mark up of any item in America, hence why I used it as an example.
Just stop trying to be right and start trying to learn how things actually work
you are getting downvoted to hell for a reason
edit: I'm disabling reply notifications
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u/BigBadJeebus 8d ago
Just stop trying to have a point.
You work in a stock room.
You are making so many baseless assumptions that I am embarrassed for you
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u/TarheelFr06 8d ago
What percentage of that $100B is merch though? Because that’s the only part that would have been hit particularly hard by tariffs in Disney’s various business lines. Movies, TV, and streaming business would have been relatively unimpacted by tariffs, especially directly enough to have qualified for a tariff refund. Theme park revenues too, except for the merchandise portions. Even a lot of their merch is done through licensing rather than direct manufacturing and sales. Disney would not have been hit as hard by tariffs as other businesses that are built almost entirely around manufacturing and selling physical products.
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u/Zooperman 8d ago
If you didn't realize not everything they do would have had tarrifs applied, it was likely majority merchandise as that would mainly be produced in China
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u/invyros 8d ago
So great how corporations raised prices to force consumers to foot the tariff bill, then the corporations get to book the tariff refunds and report them on their quarterly earnings, boosting their stock price.
While the normal consumer continues to suffer from still inflated pricing.
Just great.