JEFFERIES: Costs at ESPN are holding back Disney (DIS)
Markets Insider
Disney's stock price is up 7.7% this year, but Jefferies analyst John Janedis thinks that it is going nowhere over the next 12 months.
In a note sent out to clients on Monday, the analyst raised his price target for the stock from $100 to $110, a sign he believes that it is already fully valued.
The Jefferies "sports tracker" suggests that live sports hours on ESPN have peaked and leveled off at about 3,000 a year. As a result, Janedis thinks that advertising revenue growth for live sports will slow at ESPN.
The analyst notes that sports rights pose a major cost burden to ESPN, especially when more and more millennials are cutting the cord.
The 2017 NBA rights deal alone cost ESPN $1.1 billion, double from the year before. That's $600 million less on the balance sheet as a result of that one deal alone. Rights deals like the NBA account for roughly halve of ESPN's costs.
Jefferies
That being said, the reason Jefferies is raising their price target is because the analyst believes the network is undergoing serious efforts to cut costs in other areas, in particular head count:
We believe ESPN will need to cut ~$160M in costs to manage to 8% programming and production expense growth. With the sports rights locked in, the largest opportunity ESPN has to cut costs is headcount. Recent press reports suggest that ESPN will cut from its on-air personalities (among other areas) over the next several months. The upcoming potential round of layoffs follows a prior round of that took place in October 2015. As a reminder, at that time ESPN laid off about 300 employees, or about 4% of its workforce, mostly non audience facing positions.
It is important to keep in mind that ESPN is just one part of Disney's empire, but according to Jefferies, it carries some serious weight.