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The Walt Disney Company is enacting a round of layoffs. CEO Robert Iger, appearing in his first earnings report since re-joining the company, announced the job cuts on Wednesday as part of a wider restructuring at the media giant.
Disney is expecting to cut costs by $5.5 billion, and the 7,000 layoffs amount to about 4% of the company’s total workforce. “We must return creativity to the center of the company, increase accountability, improve results, and ensure the quality of our content and experiences,” Iger said, as reported by The New York Times.
Regarding the job cuts, Iger said (via Deadline), “I have enormous respect and appreciate for the dedication of our employees worldwide. While this is necessary to address the challenges we face today, I do not make this decision lightly.”
Deadline reported that the Disney layoffs will hit workers in the US the “hardest,” but the job losses will be “fairly light” from Disney’s lucrative Parks and Resort unit. A “significant” number of job losses will be from the Disney Media and Entertainment Division, the report said.
As for the restructuring, Disney’s content production and distribution divisions will now be a single unit. Sports is the exception, with ESPN becoming a standalone business division. People are theorizing that this is part of an effort to put ESPN up for sale, but Iger said this is not the case. “We did not do it for that purpose. ESPN continues to create real value for us. We just have to figure out how to monetize it in a disrupting world,” he said.
Also during the earnings briefing, Disney announced it will make sequels to some of its biggest animated franchises, including Toy Story, Frozen, and Zootopia. Disney also confirmed that Disney Plus subscriber numbers continued to grow in the United States.
