Walt Disney Co.
has laid off more than 300 employees in Beijing who worked on its streaming services, according to people familiar with the situation, part of a cost-cutting and restructuring effort at the entertainment company.
The layoffs in China come as Disney this week started carrying out the first wave of cuts in a previously announced plan to slash 7,000 jobs.
The China layoffs affected technology employees who were working on such features as personalization, search and customer identification for Disney’s streaming services, the people said.
Disney said in a statement that the move in China “is part of the company’s cost-cutting effort and global reorganization.”
Disney has made streaming a focal point of its business. It operates a number of services, including the flagship Disney+, which is available in much of the world except for mainland China, as well as ESPN+ and Hulu in the U.S. and Disney+ Hotstar in Asia.
Disney+ had 161.8 million subscribers as of Dec. 31; Hulu had 48 million; and ESPN+ had 24.9 million. Under pressure from investors to better manage costs, the company has committed to achieving profitability for its streaming business by September 2024. Since the 2019 launch of Disney+, the company’s streaming business has lost nearly $10 billion, according to financial disclosures.
Robert Iger
returned as Disney’s CEO in November, after the ouster of predecessor
Bob Chapek,
and quickly announced that the company would make $5.5 billion in budget cuts and reduce head count. He also reorganized the company’s corporate structure and eliminated the division that Mr. Chapek had set up to make decisions about streaming and distribution.
Among other cost-cutting moves, Disney recently cut the roughly 50-person team dedicated to developing metaverse strategies, The Wall Street Journal reported.
Disney has also laid off Isaac “Ike” Perlmutter, chairman of Marvel Entertainment LLC, and plans to fold the comic-book publishing business into Disney Entertainment, the company’s content-production division. Last year, Mr. Perlmutter teamed up with his friend, the activist investor
Nelson Peltz,
to try to persuade Disney to appoint Mr. Peltz to its board of directors.
Disney said it has laid off several other high-ranking executives this week, including Chief Compliance Officer Alicia Schwarz, whose duties will be assumed by General Counsel Horacio Gutierrez. Others who lost their jobs include Mark Levenstein, senior vice president of production at Hulu; Jayne Bieber, a top executive at the family-oriented network Freeform; and Elizabeth Newman, who oversaw creative acquisitions for 20th Television Studios and whose department has been dissolved.
Disney, which maintains offices in China, has spent more than a decade aggressively courting Chinese consumers and officials. Since the 1990s, many of the company’s biggest films have screened in Chinese theaters—and blockbusters such as “Avengers: Endgame” and “Avatar 2: The Way of Water” are among the highest-grossing movies in the country’s history. Disney employees in China can confer with the country’s officials and distribution executives about securing such releases.
More recently, as relations between China and the U.S. deteriorated, several Disney titles were among those turned away by the Chinese Communist Party officials who rule on a movie’s distribution in the country. That has shifted in recent months, as Disney releases such as “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever” gained approval.
Disney’s China ambitions have stretched beyond the box office. In 2016, after more than a decade of lobbying Chinese officials, the company opened Shanghai Disney Resort, a $5.5 billion amusement park that is among its biggest in the world.
To open the park, Disney had to agree to be a minority stakeholder in the resort alongside several Chinese entities. Today it functions like any Disney park, with Marvel Studios superheroes on hand for selfies and Mickey Mouse ears for sale.
Like other American-based media companies, Disney has had no luck getting its streaming service into China. Disney+ isn’t available in mainland China, part of a broader effort by Beijing to preserve the market for its homegrown streaming services. Disney+ rivals such as
Netflix Inc.
have also been denied access to Chinese consumers.
—Erich Schwartzel and Robbie Whelan contributed to this article.
Write to Jessica Toonkel at jessica.toonkel@wsj.com and Joe Flint at Joe.Flint@wsj.com
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