March Madness: Disney vs. General Electric

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Mar 17, 2015
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Walt Disney Co (DIS) vs. General Electric Company(GE) promises to be a close game, but I expect General Electric to pull through with a buzzer beater.

This is shaping up to be a classic match of momentum vs. value. Disney clearly has the momentum here, as the stock is up about 10% year to date and 27% over the past 12 months. Disney is up by more than 80% over the past two years.

To put that in context, the S&P 500 is up about 32%.

General Electric has traded sideways for the past two years, missing most of the monster rally of 2013-14. Shares are down by about 2% over the past year and up a modest 8% over the past two.

General Electric (GE, Financial)

Let’s dig deeper into General Electric. The 2008 meltdown forced GE to eat some serious humble pie and rebuild itself as a true industrial conglomerate. Before the crisis, its GE Capital unit had grown so large that General Electric had essentially become a high-risk hedge fund that also happened to build stuff. That didn’t end well, as GE had to run toWarren Buffett hat-in-hand for an emergency loan when the credit markets imploded.

GE Capital’s balance sheet has shrunk by about half, and by the end of this year General Electric hopes to get no more than 30% of its earnings from financial services.

The reorganization for GE has not been particularly easy. Revenues are still down by nearly 20% from their pre-crisis highs, as are gross margins. But despite this, GE has managed to shrink its long-term debt outstanding from $322 million in 2008 to just $230 million today. All in all, General Electric is now a far less risky — though also significantly less profitable — diversified industrial company.

Investors have mostly yawned at General Electric, considering it too boring in its current form to warrant an investment. But this indifference has created a reasonably good value. GE trades for 16.8 times earnings and yields 3.5% in dividends.

GE slashed its dividend in 2009, but it quickly started raising it again in 2010 and hasn’t stopped since. The annualized dividend growth rate over the past three years was 13.4%. Not too shabby!

In General Electric, we get a moderately priced stock paying a high and growing dividend that has been off most investors’ radars for years. That’s an attractive story.

But how does Disney look?

Disney (DIS, Financial)

DIS stock has had a fantastic run, driven in part by the success of Disney’s movie franchises.Frozen has proven to be a merchandising windfall, as has Disney’s relationship with Marvel and its comic book franchises. With an upcoming Avengers movie coming out this summer, Disney bulls are hoping for a record-breaking box office take as well as a toy and merchandise splurge by parents.

But while Disney’s movies and theme parks tend to get the most attention, Disney is primary a TV media company. Its media division — which includes broadcast giant ABC and cable sports juggernaut ESPN — accounts for close to half of revenues in any given year.

And herein lies a problem …

Television is an industry undergoing a transformation, and no one is exactly sure how the revenue model will shift in the coming years. Disney’s advertising revenues have been somewhat volatile over the past two years, but these were offset by “contractual rate increases to affiliates.” In other words, your cable company paid Disney more for the rights to the ESPN and Disney channels.

That’s good, right?

In a vacuum, yes. But the cost of monthly cable bills have been increasing at a rate of about 6% annually, and the average cable bill today is about $123 per month. Given that income growth has been stagnant for years, that’s not a sustainable trend.

Thus far, “cord cutting” has been mostly a myth. A relatively small percentage of Americans has taken the proactive step of cancelling their cable service. But millennials — the generation that corporate American is betting its future on — aren’t going out of their way to buy it, either. They can generally find the shows they like — legally or illegally — online, and there is no room for a $123 cable bill in their meager incomes. This leaves the major media companies ever more dependent on aging baby boomers.

Our First-Round Pick: General Electric

As millennials get haircuts and real jobs, they may decide to live a little and pay up for cable. Or, accustomed to living without it, they may decide their money can be spent elsewhere. In any event, until we see some clarity here, Disney’s media assets would appear at risk of some nasty surprises in the years ahead.

That makes General Electric the winner this round.