Disney Seeking Asia Sites, New Cruise Venture : Amusements: More overseas theme parks are planned. Company agents have been shopping at shipyards in Europe.
Walt Disney Co. may start its own cruise ship line, and is looking for theme park sites in Asia, a top executive confirmed Tuesday.
Disney’s interest in entering the cruise business comes near the end of an eight-year relationship with Florida-based Premier Cruise Lines.
“It’s more than window shopping,” Peter Rummel, president of Disney Development Co., said in an interview. “We have spent some time trying to understand the (cruise) business.”
More broadly, the Pacific Rim presents an “enormous business opportunity” for Disney, Rummel said in a memo last week to Disney executives.
Rummel said Disney is ready to continue expanding internationally although the Euro Disney resort outside Paris lost more than $900 million in the last fiscal year.
Disney has threatened to abandon that project--it owns 49% of Euro Disney’s parent company--if lenders won’t refinance construction loans there.
The news of expansion plans offered further evidence that the Burbank-based company is actively looking for fresh opportunities to exploit its strengths in family entertainment. It comes on the heels of an announcement that Disney will renovate a theater on New York’s 42nd Street for stage productions, and in the midst of the first season of the Mighty Ducks of Anaheim, a National Hockey League team.
Jeffrey Logsden, an analyst with Seidler Amdec Securities in Los Angeles, called Disney’s long-range planning on Asia commendable, though he cast doubt on the cruise ship efforts.
Instead of developing a cruise business, he said, profit margins would be higher if Disney could entice more people to stay in the hotels in its theme parks, where they are continually shelling out money for food, tickets and souvenirs.
In Asia, Disney already has its name on the popular Tokyo Disneyland, owned by Oriental Land Co.
That relationship remains close enough that Disney Chairman Michael Eisner announced plans two years ago to develop an ocean-oriented theme park in Tokyo with Oriental Land.
Rummel said any additional Asian sites would be developed without interfering with the Japanese property.
“The last thing we are going to do is step on our own toes,” said Rummel, who also heads Disney Design & Development, an umbrella organization that covers his division and Walt Disney Imagineering in Glendale, the company’s creative and engineering arm for theme parks.
Rummel has promoted Ken Wong, a senior vice president, to lead the hunt for new Asian sites. Wong is also the executive in charge of the proposed $3-billion Disneyland Resort in Anaheim. Rummel stressed, however, that putting Wong in charge of both projects should not suggest any loss of interest in the Anaheim project.
Some theme park industry observers agreed that there are opportunities for Disney in Asia, where there are many theme parks near major cities.
Jim Benedick, senior vice president of Management Resources, a theme park consulting firm in Tustin, said Asia is “a relatively untapped market.”
When it comes to cruise ships, Disney could quickly become a major player in the family market.
For years, its name has been linked with the “Big Red Boats” of Premier, a three-ship line based at Cape Canaveral that promotes family cruises with costumed Disney characters aboard.
The firms recently announced that their arrangement would expire March 31 “by mutual agreement.”
Since then, Disney has been talking about an alliance with another major cruise ship line.
Bruce Nierenberg, co-founder of Premier and now chairman of American Family Cruises in Miami, said Disney is “definitely” going to enter the cruise ship business.
Added Oivind Mathisen editor of Cruise Industry News, a trade publication based in New York: “It is known that Disney executives have been visiting European shipyards.”
