The Rundown - Disney Announces Abu Dhabi Theme Park, Uber Misses Revenue Estimates

Episode Date: May 7, 2025

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Public.com presents the rundown. Your daily market update in five minutes. My name is Zad Admani, and today is Wednesday, May 7th. In today's episode, we preview the Fed meeting and why the markets don't expect Jerome Powell to cut rates. We also recap earnings from Disney, Uber, Novo Nordisk, and more. Then stick around to the end of the show to find out why Grand Deft Auto's trailers keep breaking records.

We've got a great show for you today. Let's go. Stocks had a down day for the second day in a row of both the S&P and NASDAG dropped around 0.8% on Tuesday. Now, we did have some new development in the trade wars. It looks like Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is flying to Switzerland this weekend to meet with China's trade officials to discuss a potential deal. So we'll see how that goes. You know, again, we keep hearing about these meetings and potential deals, but nothing official has been announced with any country yet. Now, something official that is going to happen today is the Fed meeting.

We've been hyping up this meeting all week and it's finally here and we're going to find out at 2 p.m. Eastern what the Federal Reserve decides to do with interest rates. The market seems to be almost certain the Fed will keep interest rates unchanged despite President Trump's cyberbullying Jerome Powell to cut rates immediately. But remember, the Fed's job is to keep inflation low and employment high. And based on the latest jobs report, the labor market is still looking pretty strong. Plus, there's concerns that tariffs could lead to higher inflation. And that's why the markets think the Fed will wait and see before rushing to cut rates. So we'll officially find out this afternoon. I think the real action is going to be from Jerome Powell's press conference.

Investors are going to be hanging on every one of his words like they always do. Looking for any hint of when the Fed might cut rates soon. Is the Fed going to cut rates at the June meeting? Or is the Fed going to wait for the labor market conditions to get noticeably worse before cutting rates? We'll have to see what Jerome Powell has to say about all that. I'm sure he's going to be getting questions about Trump, putting pressure on into cut rates as well. So it should be an interesting press conference.

We'll break down all the best parts for you in tomorrow's episode. So make sure you guys tune in for that. Let's run through some headlines. Starting with Disney. Disney's having a pretty big day. They reported earnings this morning and made a major announcement. Let's talk about the numbers first. Disney had a pretty solid first quarter.

Both their revenues and profits beat analyst expectations. Revenues jumped 7% in Q1 compared to last year. to $23.6 billion, and their profits came in at $3.3 billion. I think the highlight for Disney was their streaming business, which used to lose a ton of money for years, but now it's moving in the right direction. Disney Plus and Hulu combined reported a profit of $336 million, which was up significantly from the $47 million in Q1 of last year.

Disney Plus added 1.4 million subscribers, despite analysts expecting a loss due to price increases, and then Disney Plus and Hulu combined now have $100,000, 180 million subscribers total. So Disney seems to have figured out streaming. They're making a profit now. And then Disney's Parks Division continues to be a cash cow. Those revenues jumped 9% to $6.5 billion.

And profits jumped 13% to $1.8 billion. There was concerns that the economic uncertainty in Q1 might lead to less people visiting Disney parks. That didn't seem to be the case. In fact, the company said park attendance was up in Q1. And then the big announcement from Disney was that they're opening a new theme park in Abu Dhabi.

It's going to be Disney's first theme park in the Middle East. It's going to be their seventh park overall. So that should help Disney's Parks Division make even more money in the near future. So overall, I mean, Disney is crushing it right now. Streaming has become profitable. Their Parks Division continues to thrive despite some economic uncertainties. And their movies are performing pretty well at the box office, except for Snow White.

We don't have to talk about that one. Now, there is some concerns about Disney's declining traditional TV business, which saw revenues drop by 13%. but Disney's streaming business seems to be making up for that decline. The market seems to be pretty happy with Disney's progress. Their stock is up nearly 10% this morning at the time of this recording. There were some people out there saying that Disney CEO Bob Eager might have lost his touch. I might have been one of those people.

But man, he seems to be cooking right now. Let's shift gears and talk about Uber. They also reported earnings this morning and it was kind of a mixed bag. Revenues and gross bookings both missed analysts' expectations. Gross bookings came in at 42. $42.8 billion just shy at the $43.1 billion expected. So it wasn't a total disaster, but close enough for investors to pause and also raise concerns about consumer spending. Now, digging into Uber's business, their mobility bookings, which is their ride sharing,

was up 13 percent, and their Uber Eats division was up 15 percent. Investors are watching these metrics as a potential indicator of consumer demand, but CEO Dara Koshalashih said that right now, the company doesn't see any signs of weaker consumer sentiment, despite the tariff volatility. Now, the bright spot for Uber was that they continued to improve profitability. Their earnings per share came in at 83 cents, which was a huge improvement from the 32 cents a share lost from Q1 of last year. The reality is there's a lot of people using Uber. The platform now has 170 million monthly active users. Those users booked three billion trips in Q1, which was an 18% jump from last year. So despite the price of Uber rides going up, at this point, we're all addicted

to using an Uber. And Uber scale is a big reason Uber thinks they're perfectly positioned for their next big thing, which is robotaxies. Uber's CEO continued to say that autonomous vehicles are their single greatest opportunity for Uber, and they're already making some moves. Uber has 18 partnerships with autonomous vehicle companies, including Waymo and Weiride, which is a company out of China. In fact, there are already more than 100 robo taxis running, running in Austin through the Waymo partnership, and Dara claims that these robot cars are busier than 99% of human drivers.

If you want to learn more about what moves Uber is making when it comes to autonomous vehicles, you should check out our weekend deep dive episode. We talked about Uber, Tesla, and Waymo and how they're taking different approaches when it comes to autonomous vehicles. I'll drop a link to that episode in the description. But yeah, back to Uber,

they are positioning themselves to be the mobility app. The app you open, whether you're ordering Thai food or summoning your robot taxi to take. take you to work. Let's talk about some stocks making moves today. Shares of electronic arts are up this morning after the video game maker beat on both revenues and booking expectations for Q1. Bookings include everything from digital downloads and in-game purchases. EA credits its soccer franchise now called FC instead of FIFA and its college football games for the strong performance. Some of my personal favorite memories have been playing FIFA and the NCAA football game with my

friends back in college. So I'm glad to see these games are still doing pretty well. Just waiting for my kids to get a little older so I can beat them in FIFA and show them who's boss. Now, another stock that's having a good day is Novo Nordus. The pharma giant and the maker of OZempic is seeing their stock go up this morning after crushing earnings expectations thanks to massive demands for its weight loss drug, Wee Govy. Sales of Wee Govy and Q1 jumped 40% compared to last year, and for the first time ever, it outsold OZemPEC. No, OZEPIC was technically made for diabetics, but Wegovy was specifically made for

weight loss, and no shocker here, it's become very popular. Nova Nordus expects the demand for WeGovie to remain strong and sales to increase, especially since the FDA told compounders, which are those knockoff pharmacies, to stop making generic versions of WeGovie. And as a result, shares of Novo Nordisk are up nearly 3% this morning at the time of this recording. And then finally, we have super micro-id shares are falling after the AI server company missed both quarterly earnings and guidance estimates.

The company has been riding the AI way for the past couple of years. but they now say their customers are pausing purchases while they wait to see how Nvidia's new Blackwell AI chips perform. The company also said that macro uncertainty could hurt their business. So yeah, not a great combo for Super Micro, but they are hoping things pick back up in the June quarter, but for now, investors are hitting the sell button and shares are down around 6% this morning.

Let's wrap the show with a fun fact. Take 2's Rockstar Games dropped the second trailer for GTA6 yesterday, and it's racked up over 45 million views in just 12 hours. Now for some context here, the first GTA 6 trailer, which dropped back in December of 2023, pulled in 93 million views in 24 hours. That's the most ever for a non-music video.

So it's possible this trailer might actually break that record, which is pretty insane considering that it's just a trailer. We got some unfortunate news this week that GTA 6's release has now been pushed back to May of 2026. It was supposed to come out this year, not happening anymore. So yeah, for now, we're just going to have to memorize every frame of these trailers to get our GTA fix. I guess the bright side for me is by the time GTA 6 comes out, my kids might be mature enough to play it with me. Well, all right, guys, that's the rundown for today.

Hope you guys enjoyed today's episode. Tomorrow's episode is going to be a big one. We're going to recap the Fed meeting, so definitely don't want to miss that one. And we also got a ton of earnings still coming out. Shopify drops tomorrow morning, Coinbase and Draft Kings reports tomorrow afternoon. So we got a lot to talk about to close out this week. By the way, if you guys enjoyed this show and want to help us out, consider giving us a five-star rating on Apple or Spotify.

If you're listening on Spotify, don't forget to vote in today's Spotify poll. Leave us a comment on Spotify. All that engagement really does help us out, and it helps other people find the show. Thank you guys so much for listening. Shout out to Mike and Connor. For all the help behind the scenes, and we'll see you guys back here tomorrow.