Walt Disney Co. shares tumbled as much as 5.4% on Tuesday afternoon after CEO Bob Capek said streaming subscribers for the quarter ending September 2021, which is Disney’s FY Q4 2021, could only increase by the “low single-digit millions” during a Goldman Sachs conference, according to Variety.
Speaking at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia conference, Capek said the Disney+ subscription service will continue to grow, but “we hit some headwinds.”
For Disney+, “the quarter-to-quarter business is not linear,” Chapek said. “What we are finding out, as you’ve seen from our last several quarters in terms of our earnings, is that these numbers tend to be a lot noisier than a straight line.”
He cited some reasons for the slowdown in subscription growth are primarily due to COVID-induced production delays.
Chapek’s disclosure that Disney+ subscriptions will slow down in the current quarter comes after a rebound in the second quarter this year that exceeded Wall Street estimates. As of July 3, the online streaming platform had 116 million users worldwide.
Other reasons for the slowdown could be due to people rediscovering what normal life is outside the house in a post-COVID world.
