Document details

Walt’s Profit Formula
Dream, Diversify – and Never Miss an Angle
Mitchell Gordon
To remind the nation's builders that all the huffing and puffing of the Big Bad Wolf couldn't blow down a brick house, the Structural Clay Products Institute in Washington has plunked down $1,000 for prints of The Three Little Plgs, a movie cartoon made in 1932. This somewhat-less-than-earthshaking bit of intelligence says less, perhaps, about the promotlon of the brick industry than about the profit formula of the cartoon's creator – Walt Disney Productions. The formula: Wring every possible profitable squeal and squeak out of such assets as The Three Little Pigs and Mickey Mouse – first by diversifying into a wide variety of activities, then by dovetailing them so all work to exploit one another. (See chart on Page 12.) Kings of Kid Frontier Walter E. Disney and his crew of starry-eyed artist: and ingenious innovators are, by all odds, kings of the kid frontier. But they're also shrewd businessmen who inhabit no finuncial fantasyland. And companies beset by earnings' erosion may find some profit-making pointers by elbowing the kids aside and taking a look at the integrated doings in the wondrous world of Wait Disney Productions. Disney stockholders at the company's annual meeting here today will hear that W.D.P.'s past fiscal year, ended September 30, was its busiest, and most profitable. In that year the company earned $2.44 per share on total revenues of $35.8 million, continuing the steady climb that began five years ago when profits were only 35 cents a share on revenues of $7.7 million. Behind this record, says Roy Disney, president of W.D.P. and older brother of Chairman Walt, "is the fact that our diversified activities are related and tend to complement each other," helping the company do "relatively fine business in the face of otherwise difficult times for the motion picture industry." […]

DIX note

The images of the article via Howard Lowery are rather small and hard to read. A PDF version of the full article may be purchased for USD 4.95. A bigger version of the chart from page 12 may be found on various sites all over the internet like e.g. businessinsider.com

Source

Title
The Wall Street Journal
Source type Magazine
Volume 58.24
Published
Language en
Document type Feature
Media type text
Page count 2
Pages pp. 1,12

Metadata

Id 2017
Availability Free
Inserted 2015-12-21