Victory for Disney: Shareholders back Iger and board against Peltz challenge

Apr 03, 2024 in "The Walt Disney Company"

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Walt Disney Company headquarters in Burbank, California

Posted: Wednesday April 3, 2024 1:23pm ET by WDWMAGIC Staff

Walt Disney Co. has successfully gathered sufficient votes from shareholders to overcome an opposition led by Trian Fund Management's Nelson Peltz against its board of directors.

The vote count announced at today's shareholder meeting put Disney's board members ahead "by a substantial margin" of the challenge posed by Peltz and Jay Rasulo, a former CFO of Disney. Additionally, Blackwells Capital's attempt to nominate three candidates for Disney's board did not succeed.

Bob Iger at Walt Disney World

Shareholders voted to elect all 12 nominees recommended by the Disney Board: Mary T. Barra, Safra A. Catz, Amy L. Chang, D. Jeremy Darroch, Carolyn N. Everson, Michael B.G. Froman, James P. Gorman, Robert A. Iger, Maria Elena Lagomasino, Calvin R. McDonald, Mark G. Parker, and Derica W. Rice.

“We are immensely grateful to our shareholders for their investment in Disney and their belief in its future, particularly during this period of great change in the broader entertainment industry. We are fortunate to have a highly qualified Board of Directors who possess a profound commitment to the enduring strength of this company and an enormous amount of experience and expertise, including succession planning. I’m thankful for Bob and his exceptional management team, as well as Disney’s employees and Cast Members around the world, for continuing to deliver for consumers and shareholders throughout this distracting proxy battle,” said Mark Parker, Chairman of the Board, The Walt Disney Company.

“I want to thank our shareholders for their trust and confidence in our Board and management. With the distracting proxy contest now behind us, we’re eager to focus 100% of our attention on our most important priorities: growth and value creation for our shareholders and creative excellence for our consumers,” said Bob Iger, Chief Executive Officer, The Walt Disney Company.

Disney has made several strategic moves in recent months to regain investor confidence. These include a major investment in Epic Games, the creator of "Fortnite," plans to introduce an ESPN streaming service by 2025, and the addition of two new board members.

Trian and Blackwells have criticized Disney for what they perceive as failures in succession planning, a loss of creative momentum, and inadequacies in leveraging new technologies. Bob Iger, who returned from retirement in 2022 to lead Disney again, has been focusing on revitalizing the company's iconic franchises, making the streaming service profitable, and exploring partnerships for ESPN's digital expansion.

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HauntedPirate18 hours ago

Allegedly this money is earmarked for the futbol club he and Willow bought.

Magic Crush Drop1 day ago

Not being subtle at all.

Doberge1 day ago

The interview with Good Morning America where Bob is asked if he's more Pua or Hei Hei and he answers, "I'm not sure... I'm more Maui, right? Demigod." 😏

Robbiem1 day ago

He really is turning into the corporate villain from a 70s Disney movie, he needs to meet some children trying to save their home to teach him how to enjoy life. Maybe they give him Herbie as his corporate car?

Lilofan1 day ago

Looks like his annual salary yearly bonus and his social security check he was earning wasn’t enough.

JoeCamel3 days ago

He had to or lose it, he gets a tax bill for the difference as ordinary income so in his bracket ~40% maybe. Hope he can find some offsets somewhere

GhostHost10003 days ago

Black Friday is coming up. Bob needed to go shopping I guess. $42.7mil. Wow

Brian3 days ago

Looks like Bob just cashed in. https://blogmickey.com/2024/11/bob-iger-sells-42-million-worth-of-disney-stock/

Comped4 days ago

Most divestures from the Fox purchase were forced by the EU or other governments to allow the deal to go through in the first place (except for A&E Europe which was a bad move on the EU's part IMO, as it was a rather useless divestiture). I'm sure Disney would have rather kept the lot (at least for a while). Disney owning Sky likely would have had very interesting ramifications for ESPN stateside (PL rights would have been nearly certain), but would have put a good amount of strain on Disney's profit margin.

HauntedPirate4 days ago

Of course it is! Just ask Bob, he'll tell you so.

monothingie4 days ago

They raised the bid by $3.2B. That's a big difference from the $20B that Comcast drove up the price for Disney to purchase 21CF. You seem to gloss over the $20B premium paid on top of the original deal as it was insignificant. I'm not sure how you get $40B from divestitures when it seemed to only total $15B with the majority of that coming from the sale of the Fox RSNs. This is misleading. The "General Audience" (Adult) programing is what Hulu brought to table and D+ was never intended to go down that route. You keep going back to the timeline developed at launch that D+ would be profitable by 2024 but there is so much context missing from that assessment. 1. There was never consideration of relying on an ad supported model. 2. There was never consideration of complete HULU integration. 3. The expected profits were going to be many times what is being realized now or even being forecast. 4. There was no expectation that the losses would have been so large. (They were basically blowing up a fleet of DCL cruise ships a year at the height of their losses.) D+ main challenge is going to be user churn and loss of retail subscribers via the constant price increases. If Bob's hot mic comment about ad-tier subscribers is accurate, then they are apparently underperforming in this subscriber segment. The "success" of DTC for Disney has not come from putting out a good product with good content, but rather through acquisitions, price increases, password crackdowns, and introducing an ad-supported tier. Like the experiences segment which showed growth mostly through price increases, is that truly a sustainable path?

MisterPenguin5 days ago

Comcast did drive up the cost of Fox. But Disney returned the favor and bid up the cost of Sky, which Comcast bought. And now that Sky was overpriced, Disney sold their share of the overpriced Sky to Comcast. In the end, after buying Fox, Disney got $40M out of divestitures, drastically reducing the cost of Fox. Disney kept Fox out of competitors' hands. And transformed D+ content from "family" to "general audience" allowing them to set a new sub target after blowing through the first target in a manner of months. And Disney met their goal of when D+ would be profitable. In a competitive market, you're not going to have fantastical win after win. Even Netflix, the front runner, had a live-action streaming debacle. But that's not going to sink Netflix. And Disney isn't going to sink with several minor setbacks.

Brian5 days ago

Two years ago tonight, Iger was abruptly reinstated as CEO and Chapek was relegated to the Disney archives.

BrianLo5 days ago

There was immediate divestments of 30.5 billion dollars for the bigger ticket items. Many of them contingent and occurred with the purchase. Sky before. Hotstar most recently. I cannot find accessible numbers for True(X), Fox Next, TeleColombia, FoxSports Mexico, A&E Europe, Argentinian FoxSports. So in essence Disney is saddled with a 30-35B end price. Not 71. Hulu is worth 8.9 (at least). As for the other 20-25B, that’s the rub. FX, Searchlight, 20th century are the main keynotes. Along with their back catalogues and IP. They basically bought a general entertainment catalogue and production arm; which is not nothing. It’s actually a fairly strong general entertainment based arm. I’m not disagreeing that Bob was about to get an actual good deal and Roberts drove it up.