Brian Roberts and Mike Cavanagh announced this morning that Comcast is going to be spinning of NBC Universal and Sky into its own separate company. Comcast will be the majority stakeholder in the new company but it will be publicly traded on the stock market.
For now, Roberts and Cavanagh insist that this move is to not sell NBC Universal and that this move will make it a stronger company. This deal is expected to be complete by mid 2027.
So what does this mean for the theme park division? Well it seems a mixed bag. The fact that this new standalone company will be much smaller means they will have less available funding from the never ending hose of money that Comcast provided. On the flip side, the theme park division will be the most profitable division of this new company so they shouldn’t see too much of a cut of funding and may even have an increase of funding for new park projects inside the current theme parks. They may be less ambitious into building new theme parks like Universal United Kingdom or making their own cruise lines, but the existing parks and resorts should be good for expansion funding wise.
Comcast recently also spun of a bunch of cable companies they owned into a new company called Versant. Though this was a recent endeavor, Versant has not been talked about for being acquired by anyone so that could bode well for NBCUniversal in terms of not being acquired via hostile takeover.
If someone were to buy NBCUniversal who would it be? It would likely be a tech company or a private equity. If a private equity were to acquire the company that would be devastating as the last time a private equity had NBCUniversal the entire company suffered. In terms of tech companies, maybe Netflix or Apple would be interested in acquiring NBCUniversal and if so they have a big spigot of money to spend at the parks.
Stay tuned as this story continues to develop.
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