Disney CFO Hugh Johnston Talks Streaming
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We welcome Bloomberg Tech co-hosts Ed Ludlow and Caroline Hyde, and they are joined by Disney CFO Hugh Johnston. Take it away. Thank you very much indeed. It's wonderful to be joined by you, Hugh, with Ed and I across various parts of America. Hugh, just first, start with us for a moment, will you? Rating Disney's overall fourth quarter performance, you were strong in parks, you were strong in streaming, but there was some weakness in films and TV. Talk us through how you rate yourself.
Yeah, actually, I thought it was a good quarter overall. And frankly, versus Wall Street, we beat expectations by six cents. So, as you noted, the experiences business did very, very well. 6% revenue growth, 13% OI growth was terrific. Sports did very strongly while we were launching the new DTC product, which is off to a great start. And then in terms of the entertainment business, it was largely just the overlap of the film slate that drove the numbers. I know the linear business looked a little bit soft, but that's primarily due to the fact that we had India in the numbers last year where we made 84 million bucks and wasn't in the numbers this year. Take that out. Apples to apples basis. Overall, I thought the quarter was good.
And it actually allows us to end the year with a lot of momentum. As we think about where we are right now, we grew EPS 19% for the year and 19% CAGR for the last three years. And that's why we both guided to double digit EPS growth in 26. And on top of that, doubled the share of purchase and increased the dividend by 50%.
Hugh, good morning. On that momentum, the focus for a lot is streaming, right? And you have the confidence to say streaming is going to continue to be profitable through 2026. What are the factors behind that? What allows you to have the confidence to have such visibility into how that streaming business is going?
Well, of course, streaming always begins with the quality of the content that we have and the quality of the slate that we have going forward. So if you think about the film slate we have right now, number one, we obviously have Zootopia 2, followed by Avatar, followed by The Devil Wears Prada 2, followed by Toy Story 5, Moana, And then we've got an Avengers movie as well. So if I look at all of that playing its way into the streaming service, certainly feel good about those tentpole events. In addition to that, our TV side continues to perform very strongly. The ratings are great. The number of hit shows are great. And then on top of that, we're investing in the product in a significant way, creating a unified app.
And in addition to that, improving our recommendation engines and improving the navigation within the DTC app put all of that together. And what we really see is just a huge opportunity for growth. We aspire to grow that business double digits along with the double digit margins we expect to achieve this coming year. And as a result, I think we're going to continue to see that business do really well and be a real growth driver for Disney.
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