Disney+ price rises help UK sales surge towards £4bn on back of The Bear and Welcome to Wrexham
The popularity of Disney+ in the UK helped the entertainment giant‘s sales take a giant leap towards the £4bn mark in the country during its latest financial year.
The Walt Disney Company Limited, which is based in London, has reported a turnover of £3.8bn for the year to September 30, 2023, up from £3.1bn.
Newly-filed accounts with Companies House have also revealed that its pre-tax profit surged from £456.5m to £718.4m over the same period.
Disney said that the increase in turnover and profit for the period was mainly driven by Disney+ and a “strong performance” in motion pictures in the period, offset by a downside in licensed content distribution.
Recently it has streamed the popular fly-on-the-wall docuseries, ‘Welcome to Wrexham’, charting the Welsh side’s rise up the ranks after investment from Hollywood owners, Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney.
Subscribers up despite film flops
In the third quarter of 2022 the number of UK subscribers to Disney+ stood at 6.98 million, a figure which had risen to 7.6 million by the end of the same quarter in 2023.
During the year Walt Disney Studios released the likes of Hocus Pocus 2, Disenchanted, The Little Mermaid and Elemental.
However, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, Haunted Mansion and Wish were all considered to have been among the biggest flops of 2023.
Disney’s UK and Ireland sales increased from £993.2m to £1bn while they jumped from £1.9m to £2.5m in the rest of Europe. Its turnover in the rest of the world rose slightly from £193m to £195.1m.
Disney’s parks, experiences, and products business saw its turnover cut from £546.5m to £526.1m while its media and entertainment unit’s sales rose from £2.5m to £3.2m.
The average number of people employed by Disney’s UK arm in the year increased from 1,878 to 1,947.
The UK arm also paid a dividend of £655.1m in the year, up from £425m.
Prices rises leads to profit success
In separate accounts, the group’s commissioning arm, Walt Disney EMEA productions, reported a turnover of £86.4m, down from £214.5m, while its pre-tax profit was cut from £27m to £21m.
The company said that production work on most titles had completed during the year which explained the decrease in its turnover.
For the same financial period, the wider Walt Disney group reported a revenue of almost $88.9bn, up from $82.7bn, and a pre-tax profit of $4.7bn, down from $5.2bn.
Last month, Disney said its streaming service turned its first profit since launching in 2019 on the back of popular shows from its Hulu network such as The Bear.
The entertainment giant said its direct-to-consumer streaming service made $47m profit (£37.44m) in the second quarter to 30 March.
This comes after Disney’s streaming service has lost around $11bn since launching in 2019, including $587m (£467.58m) a year earlier, in the same period.
Disney has managed to turn heavy losses into a profit for the first time by cost-cutting and raising its prices. According to Martin Lewis’s MoneySavingExpert site, prices went up by £36 a year in the UK, joining other subscription services like Netflix.
Disney also launched a password-sharing crackdown, forcing Brits to set up new accounts instead of using family or friends’ access.