A good theme park can help weather a recession and losses in streaming.
Chances are, when you think about Comcast, the first thing that comes to mind probably isn’t a log flume.
But the telecom company has a hot theme parks business where revenue — which increased ~12% YoY to $2.1B in Q4 2022 — is far beyond even its pre-pandemic numbers, per Variety.
Today, Comcast’s NBCUniversal operates theme parks in the US, Tokyo, Singapore, and Beijing.
Planned expansions include a Super Nintendo World in California, a $1B Epic Universe in Orlando, and smaller children’s and horror concept parks in Texas and Las Vegas.
Theme parks are often regarded as recession-proof businesses. For companies like Comcast and Disney, they also provide cash that helps weather losses in their streaming units.
These conglomerates are also becoming increasingly good at monetizing visitors.
While these parks offer much more than they did in 1960, Zack’s fantastic analysis on Disneyland’s rising prices found the cost of parking has jumped 11.9k% since then, or 13.5x the rate of inflation.
Last year, per capita spending at US Disney parks was up 40% from 2019.