New Disney CEO Chapek Avid in Company’s Consumer Businesses, Not Media or DTC
In tapping 27-year company veteran Bob Chapek as new CEO, Disney chose a loyalist with experience in managing the company’s home entertainment, consumer products and theme parks businesses but not its media networks or direct-to-consumer operations.
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Chapek immediately succeeds Bob Iger, who relinquishes the CEO post after some 15 years. The succession announcement came minutes after regular U.S. markets closed Tuesday (see 2002250080).
Iger will transition to executive chairman in charge of Disney’s “creative endeavors” before leaving the company at the end of 2021. He had nearly two years left on his CEO contract. Disney repeatedly referred to Chapek Tuesday as only the seventh CEO in its nearly 100-year history. He will later join the board.
Disney has “gotten larger” and “more complex” since the 21st Century Fox acquisition and the launches of the ESPN and Disney direct-to-consumer services, said Iger on a hastily arranged investor call Tuesday. “I felt that with the asset base in place and with our strategy essentially deployed, I should be spending as much time as possible on basically the creative side of our businesses.”
Getting “everything right creatively” will be Iger’s “No. 1 goal” before he leaves Disney, he said. “I could not do that if I were running the company on a day-to-day basis.” The rationale and the timing for turning over the CEO post to Chapek now were “really that simple,” he said. The transition was “not accelerated for any particular reason other than we felt the need was now to make this change.” The board identified Chapek “quite some time ago” as Iger’s likely and eventual successor, he said.
The board was “extremely fortunate” that it had in Chapek “someone who knows the company extremely well,” said Iger. “While the board obviously did its duty in basically conducting a thorough process” to find a new CEO, said Iger, “we all felt very, very fortunate to have a candidate in Bob that is as experienced and as knowledgeable about our company as he is.”
Chapek thinks he assumes the CEO role with a “fairly broad overview of how the company operates, regardless of the different industries that we work in,” he said on the call. “That said, I’ve obviously not spent as much time on the media side or the direct-to-consumer side, but we have some really great experienced leaders who are in place in those businesses.”
As home entertainment chief, Chapek supervised Disney's Blu-ray product launches and worked closely with consumer tech brands, including through the Digital Entertainment Group, where he once served as chairman. The company said it will name a theme-parks successor for him later.
Iger has instilled a “cross-fertilization” culture within the management team spanning all the Disney businesses, said Chapek. The heads of the various sectors “meet each and every week and discuss each other’s businesses,” he said. That makes Chapek “familiar with the opportunities and some of the challenges that they all face,” he said.