Disney CEO Iger Fails

The Wall Street Journal has a large Disney and Netflix stock price chart. It is used to illustrate the market’s reaction to the departure of Disney’s CFO, Christine McCarthy. It is an indictment of the brief current reign of CEO Bob Iger. He retired and left the CEO job to Bob Chapek. Chapek’s perceived failure to keep Disney successful got him fired, and Iger was rehired.

The chart tells a terrible story. Netflix shares are up over 147% in the last year. Disney’s are off 3%. Netflix has made a comeback in its core streaming business. Disney’s streaming business has lost well over $1 billion. Iger has driven Disney into the ground.

The contrast could not be more simple. Disney+ attempted to become one of the dominant services in streaming. It quickly got 160 million paid subscribers. Iger priced the service at $6.99 a month, almost half below the Netflix number. Disney was ruined financially from the start.

Iger has raised the price of his video services. He must hope those price increases do not drive subscribers away, which would dig a deeper hole.

What is hard to understand is how Iger made such a fundamental mistake. This is particularly true as he entered one of the most crowded media spaces–streaming. He had to contend with Amazon, Netflix, Apple. HBO and a small army of more minor services. (This is America’s favorite streaming service.)

A typical American household has four streaming services. In many cases, people churn these. This means people move from one service to another over and over to find the service they like the most, even if this decision is only temporary.

For so long, Iger was the most brilliant man in media. He has lost whatever image he built.

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