Disney is set to lay off 28000 of its employees across the value chain, as the difficulties in operation due to the Wuhan virus pandemic and the sudden fall in revenue of the parks.
The company’s head of parks Josh D’Amaro wrote a letter to Disney’s employees on Tuesday to announce “difficult decisions” to reduce the size of its staff across executive, salaried and hourly roles as it approaches the end of its fiscal quarter after billions of dollars in revenue downturns in 2020.
“We initially hoped that this situation would be short-lived and that we would recover quickly and return to normal,” he wrote, “Seven months later, we find that has not been the case.”
Disney had closed off its parks in March at the beginning of the lockdown and had started reopening only in limited capacity around the globe towards the end of July. The reopening of the Disney World park, in particular, was met with a lot of controversies, especially in California where the cases have steadily been increasing. Disney took a $1bn hit by the end of the second quarter in March following closures that month, while the persistence of the Covid-19 crisis ballooned that figure to $3.5bn by the end of the third quarter in June.