This essay focusses on The Walt Disney USA and its foreign direct investment in France. The worldwide business system of Disney will be explored so that lessons can be learned from the triumphs and disappointments of Disney’s expansions to the global market focussing on the investment made in France. Further we will look into how the company makes decisions on investing in a foreign country and how they are formed in a certain way using relevant theories. The Walt Disney Company is an American multinational mass media and entertainment conglomerate, headquartered at the Walt Disney Studios in Burbank, California. It revolutionized the concept of theme parks by creating Disneyland Anaheim in California.
The Walt Disney Company, founded in 1923 in Burbank, California, is a diversified worldwide entertainment company with operations in five business segments: Media Networks, Parks and Resorts, Studio Entertainment, Consumer Products, and Interactive. The Media Networks group includes cable and broadcast television networks, production operations, distribution, domestic television stations, including ESPN, The Disney Channel, and ABC, and radio networks and stations. Disney has many strengths in its operations. It is considered to be a very diversified business. Based off of an article by ValueLine, Disney has grown from a small producer of animation series in the 1920s to one of the largest media and entertainment conglomerate in the world.
Walt Disney is the founder of Disney Production Inc in year 1923. As most of the consumers commented that Disney Production Inc is a one of the well known company located in United State. The reason why they say so is because Disney Production Inc is a wholesome family entertainment compared to other corporation. As most of the people around the world know one of the signature characters of Disney Productions Inc is Mickey Mouse. With this signature characters, Walt Disney has successfully attract public attention and hence he grab the opportunity to come out with the ideas to create more characters to avoid public get bored of their production.
Walt Disney exists since it is one of the creative and innovative inventions in the field of media entertainment. Disney introduces motion pictures, famous as a pioneer of cartoon films and as the creator of Disneyland. Walt Disney Co has young, eager staff of animation professional emerged, cartoonist apprentices who wanted more than anything to continue the Disney traditions of art and entertainment. Many were scoffed at for choosing this career, common wisdom deemed that they were entering a dying business. Walt Disney Co reported higher quarterly profit that beat Wall Street forecast as cable networks including ESPN brough in higher advertising revenue and collected more fees from pay TV distributors.
Disney witnessed its worse years in business in the following 18 years after Walt Disney’s demise. The company was so depended on Walt Disney for creativity and no one could fill this void. By late 1970s and early 1980s, the film division declines due to the dearth of Creativity. The financial performance of the company deteriorated from 1980 to 1983 and it was surviving solely due to its theme parks, which had remained popular and profitable. Moreover, Disney incurred heavy costs as it was investing in EPCOT and the new Disney Channel.
Walt Disney revolutionized animation and cartoon movie making. He created classic movies like Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Dumbo. Over his career in animation, Disney won twenty-two Academy Awards and four Emmy Awards along with other accolades. In 1955, Disney took his company in a different direction and founded the Walt Disneyland theme park. This would go on to be a very good decision as the park made lots of money and the company spread to Florida where it created Disneyworld.
ETHICAL ISSUE AT WALT DISNEY The Walt Disney Company is a leading international family entertainment and media enterprise. The company is there in the field of family entertainment for more than nine decades. From their humble beginnings as a cartoon studio in the 1920s to the global corporation they are today, the company continues to proudly provide quality entertainment for every member of the family all around the world. They have five main business segments including studio entertainments,, interactive medias, consumer products, parks and resorts and media networks. The subsidiaries within these segments of the Disney Corporation include ESPN, Touchstone, Marvel, ABC, Pixar, numerous theme parks and resorts, and a variety of consumer product lines.
The Walt Disney company is one of the most well known company in the world. “The Walt Disney Company originated with its animated characters and expanded into other adjacent businesses with the goal of bringing happiness to families via several different, but related revenues” (Carillo, Carlos et. al). The vast majority of society has had some exposure to Disney, whether movie films, parks, television shows or toys. This makes Walt Disney one of the most profitable businesses in the world.
Since the 1930’s, the Walt Disney Company is known for producing characters, images, as well as stories which have created happiness for audiences around the world. This corporation has grown from a small cartoon studio run by famous Walt and Roy Disney to a million dollar business and is a prime example of globalized American culture. In Janet Wasko’s book, “Understanding Disney”, Wasko explains Disney as corporation name it “The Disney Empire”. Throughout her book, Wasko argues that Disney is set up like a typical profit seeking corporation, as well as an industry that re-invents folk tales by “Americanising” them (Wasko 2001). Rather than looking at Disney as a place of magic, Janet Wasko examines Disney as a corporation, which is known
Disney’s ability to change its focused demographics, create a substantial competitive advantage, manipulate the marketing mix to fit each franchise, and focus on specific strategic plans has allowed for Disney to become one of the top platforms in the world. Disney’s change from appealing to one segment of the market, which originally was focused on younger children, to focusing on appealing to many different demographics and marketing groups was achieved by using multiple marketing segments or strategies paired with implementing different marketing mixes. In Disney’s case, they changed their product or shows/movies in order to target different age groups as well as different sexes. The first change was that Disney moved the Disney Channel from premium to basic cable in order to allow for almost everyone with basic cable to have access to their shows, which Disney done by changing its place component of the