Apple should buy Disney which would create a technology and entertainment juggernaut unlike anything the world has ever seen, according to Needham analyst Laura Martin.
In a research report, Martin said with Apple having 1.25B “unique consumers” using its products and services, and the 570M consumers that Disney reaches every year tie up, the company’s “are worth more together than separately.”
Martin said that Apple and Disney are “complementary” due to each company having particular strengths that could become stronger together. For Apple, that would be how it distributes content to its customers, as witnessed not only by its 1.25B “unique and wealthy users”, but the 2B iPhones and iPads that those customers owned. Meanwhile, Martin said that what Disney does best is create well-known content franchises which it is able to distribute on digital screens globally, “as well as in the physical world.”
Disney has a market cap of about $178B. Add on a premium that would be included with and purchase and it’s safe to say that Apple could easily pay more than $200B to bring the Disney empire under its watch.
“Defensively, content beats technology as a multi-decade moat,” Martin said, adding that bundling Disney’s products with those of Apple would make Apple shareholders happy by potentially giving a 25% boost to Apple’s market value.
MacDailyNews Take: Obviously, this is not a new idea. It’s been bandied about for years.
In December 2021, Disney CEO Bob Iger told CNBC’s David Faber that while he never spoke with Steve Jobs about a potential merger of Apple and Disney, but he believes the deal likely would have “gotten there” had Jobs lived longer.
As we wrote back in March 2020:
Well, now, such an acquisition would certainly jibe with some whispers we’d heard [in November 2019] prior to the coronavirus outbreak of a major Apple acquisition possibly being in the works.
Such an acquisition would of course be quite an undertaking as Apple would have to bring the parts of Disney that are unique (think theme parks) into the fold (or keep them as an Apple subsidiary). On the positive side, Apple TV+ would immediately become a massive streaming entity as Disney+ content rolled into Apple’s streaming service would be an instant juggernaut.
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