Coming out of the pandemic, Disney (DIS -0.32%) has experienced a remarkable recovery. In this clip from "3 Minute Stocks Updates" on Motley Fool Live, recorded on March 2, Fool.com contributor Toby Bordelon looks at all the healthy revenue numbers for the media giant as it heads toward its 100th anniversary in 2023.
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Toby Bordelon: Let's turn to Walt Disney now. Walt Disney Company, they reported earnings recently for their Q1 2022, which ended on Jan. 1 of this year. This incorporates a holiday season we got, which is nice. Revenue up 34% to $21.8 billion. This is a big company generating a lot of money. Operating income though $1.7 billion. It seems a little bit low, but it's versus $46 million year-over-year so they have made some substantial improvements in the pandemic.
The story here really is a recovery from the pandemic. Operating cash flow they're still losing money on a cash-flow basis, $209 million free cash flow for the year with a minus $1.2 billion. This is because of higher spending in large part on content production. They're just trying to catch up it seems, and get a lot of that content out.
Disney+ subscribers though the good news grew 11.8 million versus the seven million in the market was expecting. When Netflix (NFLX -0.50%) reported we were thinking, oh, streaming's slowing. Is this market reaching its peak? Maybe for Netflix but not for Disney. Maybe the problem is that it's slowing for Netflix specifically, Disney still has growth ahead of them it seems.
Let me take you through some of the numbers on the two major segments they've got. Media and entertainment, and I'll show you this here because I want people to get a sense of the numbers here. This is where the streaming is, this is where the television station is. You see linear networks this is ABC, this ESPN. These are the television stations, their cable operations here. Not much growth. It's staying steady, but it's still the largest single contributor to this segment.
On the other hand, direct-to-consumer, Disney+, Hulu, ESPN+, Hotstar Internationally, 34 percent growth here. You're seeing this pick up. We're seeing, it's not quite the level with the linear network that's still an important part of the business but streaming is getting close, streaming is getting there. This is certainly the growth and where things are going in the future.
Disney+ subscribers net domestically grew 18%, internationally 40%. We have total Disney+ subscribers now at 94.9 million, ESPN+ oddly grew 76%. Sorry, it's 129.8 million is the subscribers. The 95 million was last quarter. But ESPN is growing an astonishing 76% to 21 million so not very many, but large growth. Remember though, part of that is because you can get that for a dollar if you get the whole package that comes with Disney+, Hulu and ESPN.
We were seeing some ESPN growth from people who are like, "Sure, if I want Disney+ and Hulu already, what's an extra buck?" That's part of what's going on there. But this business is growing quite rapidly. You look at the parks and the experiencing segment, the domestic growth was over 100%. You can't even really put this into a three-digit number. They went to $4.8 billion domestically from $1.5 billion in the quarter last year. You are seeing a solid recovery here and that has really fantastic to see. This is still not at capacity.
Cruise ships are still at reduced capacity. In some cases, theme parks were limited to capacity so there's more to come I think as COVID continues to fade. An interesting thing to note, just think about future growth and whatnot. Disney apparently is an investor in DraftKings (DKNG 4.16%) and Fubo so they're in that market as well. They're looking at. Maybe you're going to see more of that with ESPN in terms of the gaming revenue.
Final note here, 100th year for Disney as a company guys. Next year will be their 100th anniversary, beginning a new century of Disney business. That's just fantastic. I think I could see them going for another 100 years easily and continuing to generate the content people love and want to experience.
