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Hugh Johnston

Senior Executive Vice President & Chief Financial Officer, Walt Disney The

Search every verified Hugh Johnston interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. During Disney's fiscal third-quarter 2026 earnings call on August 5, 2026, Hugh Johnston, the company's chief financial officer, discussed the company's financial strategy and performance. He stated that Disney is not focused on building cash or significantly deleveraging its balance sheet, expressing satisfaction with its current leverage position. Johnston said the company's goal is to drive both growth and capital return to shareholders, adding that it has the capacity to do both. Johnston also addressed the impact of tariffs on Disney's full-year performance, describing it as immaterial, and attributed the company's results to execution by the parks team, including strong attendance growth and per-capita spending, as well as growth in cruise operations. He noted that Disney's return on invested capital in its experiences segment has increased meaningfully over time and that the company expects strong returns into the future, citing a 4% increase in global gross segment margin for the quarter.

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Notable quotes

“Netflix would be an awfully big company at that point if the two came together — they have the distribution and they're trying to add more IP, which in many ways is what we already did.”

“Overall the company really has a lot of momentum right now — 5% revenue growth is a terrific number, and the two big monetization engines, streaming and experiences, are both growing profits strongly and well ahead of consensus.”

“Based on what's been proposed, the impact would be immaterial to us, so from that perspective the Walt Disney Company will be fine based on what's on the table right now.”

“Our expectation is we'll continue to grow subs and improve margins. We should make more than a billion dollars in that business this year, and next year we're looking at double-digit margins.”

“In a sense we've really created a perfect hedge. If consumers want to stay in linear we're perfectly happy with that. If they want to move over to the streaming side of how they receive their programming, because of the incremental margins per subscriber on streaming are quite high, it's almost like a software business in a lot of ways, we're happy if they move.”

“I think we've got pricing that's going to be in place probably for the next 12 months. I expect this is a product that will continue to increase in price gradually over the course of a number of years.”

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