Disney to lay off 28k employees amid COVID-19: RPT

Disney is laying off 28,000 of its workers, as the company’s theme parks continue to suffer amid the coronavirus pandemic. Yahoo Finance’s Sibile Marcellus joins Kristin Myers to discuss.

Video Transcript

KRISTIN MYERS: Let's talk about Disney. That company planning to layoff thousands as coronavirus hits its theme parks hard. So for more on this, we're joined now by Yahoo Finance's, Sibile Marcellus. Hey, Sibile.

SIBILE MARCELLUS: That's right. So the number is significant. 28,000 workers at Disney are going to be laid off, and they're workers in their parks, experiences, and consumer products businesses. And the reason why we're seeing this is because of the coronavirus pandemic's impact on Disney's theme parks.

Now it does have some theme parks open around the world, such as in Paris, Shanghai, Hong Kong, even in Florida, but two of its theme parks in California have not been able to reopen. So Disney is blaming the limitations on capacities at the theme parks that are open and the theme parks that they can't reopen as reasons why they are compelled to make this unfortunate decision of having to lay off 28,000 workers.

Now Disney is saying that a large majority of those layoffs, 67% of them, are part-time workers. And when you look at Disney's financial picture, now we're talking about the theme parks, that accounted for about 37% of the company's revenue last year. We're talking revenue of $69.6 billion. But this year with the coronavirus pandemic, we're seeing in the second quarter the company lost a billion dollars in operating income due to these parks being closed, and also the cruise lines, and the hotels. And we look at the third quarter, the company lost even more money. We're talking a loss of $3.5 billion.

KRISTIN MYERS: All right. Thank you so much, Sibile.