— This is the script of CNBC's news report for China's CCTV on December 12, 2019, Thursday.
Iger's election was both unexpected and natural, in recent years, people has got used to the tech giants under spotlight, and we have to know that Disney is a business giant with nearly a hundred years of history. Iger took in charge of it since 2005, his election can be viewed as an achievement after years of preparation. This year, Disney achieved a lot with Iger's leading.
First, Disney Picture's box office hit a record, breaking $10 billion, among that, The Avengers becomes the highest-grossing film of all time and Disney launched streaming service Disney Plus, analysts on the Wall Street hold a positive view on its perspective, meaning Disney's technological transformation starts steadily.
Under Iger's lead, Disney also acquired Fox with $71 billion and opened up 2 theme parks featuring Star Wars. Business performance is one of the evaluation criteria to a businessman.
Disney's financial report which released in Nov was beyond expectation, from start of this year, its stock price gained more than 30%.
We can see from its 5-year stock price that its jump is obvious, that is not an accident, but a result with long-term preparation.
In 2006, the 2nd year that Iger took office, Disney acquired Pixel with USD7.4 billion and Marvels and Lucasfilm, which are "cash cow" to Disney now, till this year, Disney is still optimizing its business network by acquiring and trying to grow into a tech company from media company.
Of course, Iger still have something worry about. You may remember the descendants of the Disney founder who slipped into Disneyland earlier this year, she accused Iger's sky-high annual pay of $66 million unfair and Disney's disorder in management. What's more, Disney was also accused of financial fraud. Apart from these accusations which haven't been confirmed, Disney has been facing challenges from its own business.
First, Disney Park's growth slow down this year, and faces some problems in China, getting more growth pressure. Its film business booms, but still face fierce competition from Netflix and Amazon, the launce of Disney Plus is a solution, but still hard to compete, and it will also have to compete with Apple. Finding more growth opportunity is an issue that Iger has to think of all the time.
It's nice to be named business person of the year, but under current business situation, CEO is not an easy job. There are many CEO quitted this year in the U.S.
There are 1480 CEOs resigned, according to latest data. If nothing else, the number of resigned CEO will hit a record. In 2008, there were 1484 CEOs quitted, mainly because of the financial crisis's impact.
But this year is a little bit different, actually, one of the major reasons of resignation is the relatively booming economy, so there is a high demand to senior executives. Additionally, uncertainty in trade and regulatory is another factor. The last one is what we mentioned before, technology advancement hit almost all industries. So even the CEO has to prepare to job-hop at any time. We will keep an eye on this issue.
