Comcast and Disney last week signed a modification to their agreement to bring forward the timing of their Hulu sale talks to Sept. 30, Comcast CEO Brian Roberts says.
Currently, Comcast owns one-third of Hulu and had set a pact with Disney (which owns the other two-thirds) to begin talks to sell its stake to the Mouse House in January 2024.
Speaking at a Goldman Sachs investor conference Wednesday, Roberts says all the synergies around Hulu could be worth $30 billion, before you even ascribe value to Hulu. The previous minimum number of $27.5 billion for Hulu was “hypothetical,” per Roberts, with the company “way more valuable” today than it was when that number was set.
Roberts says proceeds from Comcast’s sale of its Hulu stake would be returned to shareholders.
“We’ve seen analyst reports that a buyer, depending on who they were, if it was to scale them up, they could have a couple billion dollars, or who knows what, of synergy,” Roberts said. “Just that piece of the synergy and the churn benefit could be worth $30 billion. And that’s before you ascribe any value to the actual Hulu. And of course when you go into one of these really robust auctions– and I think if you were selling all of this as is, there’d be a line of bidders around the block to actually buy all the content, all the bundling of Hulu, that that business we’ve never seen. And so usually buyers in robust auctions pay for it all, and the seller gets all the benefits of the synergy. And that’s just what Goldman Sachs is really good at getting people to do. So I think we are excited to get this resolved. And the minimum number of $27.5 billion that people have bandied about, that was just a hypothetical that we picked five years ago because Disney had control of the company. The company is way more valuable today than it was then.”
More to come…