Sunday, August 15, 2010

The Magic Kingdom of the Disney Company

The Disney team will be doing some heavy celebrating over the course of the next few weeks, as not only will they enjoy the benefits from the release of Toy Story 3 but at the turn of this year's 3rd financial quarter, they also saw their earnings per share rise sharply.

The Walt Disney Company (DIS) reported on Tuesday 10th August that diluted earnings per share had successfully increased by 31%, with a rise from 51 cents per share to 67 cents. Disney’s current president and chief executive office Robert A. Iger said in an official statement, ‘we're very pleased with our strong third quarter, in which we grew revenues substantially and improved profitability across the majority of our businesses.’ He also went on to say, ‘our performance underscores the value of sticking to a smart strategy even in tough times, of investing in the right people, and of focusing relentlessly on quality and innovation to drive growth in shareholder value.’

The company also said that their EPS for the nine-month period that ended on July 3rd also increased 24 percent to 1.60 per share from 1.29 from last year.

As Disney continues to mount the walls of the stock exchange, financial analysts marvel at other rising entertainment companies that could also benefit from such generous fortunes. One such company is Pixar, which Disney in fact bought in 2006.

Many believe the success of Pixar has something to do with former CEO Steve Jobs, who is also the head of Apple (AAPL). Pixar’s achievements include Monsters Inc, Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Cars, Ratatouille, Wall-E and the academy award-winning Up.

Out of this bunch of leading entertainment companies, Dreamworks (DWA) has seen some great financial figures in past years with animated films such as Shrek, Monsters v. Aliens, and How to Train your Dragon. Some analysts are suggesting that flooding the market with 3-D films at a ticket price higher than a standard film has caused demand to drop subsequently, putting a damper on the company's earnings. Lew Coleman who is currently the CFO of Dreamworks commented on the lack of recent success of Shrek Forever After in some areas by saying, ‘I think you have to make a compelling case to have a 3D movie in 3D, like Avatar and Dragon. I don’t think we made that case for Shrek. If we had to do it all over again, we would probably do some things slightly different.’

Fortunately, there are plenty of other stocks in the entertainment field worth aiming your movie camera at, including several with decent dividends, which have been turned up by WallStreetNewsNetwork.com. The list can be downloaded, sorted, and changed.

Author owns DIS, AAPL, and DWA.

By Stockerblog.com

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