Tuesday, December 10, 2013

Jay Rasulo Announces That Shanghaî Disneyland May Expand Quickly After 2015 Opening



Jay Rasulo announced at the UBS Global Media and Communications Conference in New York yesterday that Disney may quickly expand Shanghai Disneyland Resort after its opening late 2015 "in order to meet rising demand in the world’s most populous country".
"Shanghai Disney Resort will be almost 1,000 acres (404.7 hectares) in size when it opens, putting it third behind Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida, and Disneyland Paris among the company’s resorts" said Rasulo. Disney will have enough room available to expand both the new park and to create another one as land has been kept on the right of Shanghaî Disneyland "Magic Kingdom".
We believe we’re developing a park that will absolutely blow people away. We’re opening the park for a pretty healthy number of attendees but more importantly both we and our partners and the Shanghai government are eager and willing to expand rapidly after that,” Rasulo said. Attendance could ultimately top Tokyo Disney Resort, which has 28 million annual visitors, Rasulo said. 
Disney owns 43 percent of the venture with the state-owned Shanghai Shendi Group Co., a consortium of three businesses, holding the rest and cost of the phase one of the project is $4.78 billion. "Shanghai Disneyland is part of a larger focus by Disney on China, where entertainment spending by consumers has lagged the growth of the middle class. The new park is within a three-hour drive of 330 million people, many of them young families" Rasulo said.
Don't get too excited, though, with Rasulo's  as what will more probably happen is that they will build new hotels and attractions and then a new theme park years later as they do usually, and this if everything goes well. We learned with the experience of Disneyland Paris to don't believe promises until works on any expansion starts for real.
Picture: copyright Disney 

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Is this their way of saying that elements of the plan have been pushed back to "Phase 2"? That some of the lands or attractions won't be ready on opening? I really hope not. It needs to open with a "critical mass" of attractions in order to be an early success and fuel future growth.

I'm also surprised that the resort as a whole will be smaller than the Paris resort. Long term, by the time they add another theme park and a handful of hotels, it looks like the land could fill up pretty quickly.

I'm anxious to see how this progresses, but very excited at the same time. It should be a unique place!

Alain Littaye said...

Well, they better don't do any cuts on the rides already programmed as there is currently not that many attractions for opening day. If they do some cuts in the attractions listed in the list posted by a WDW Magic member then they'll probably have long lines and furious chinese who will say that there is 4 hours lines for each ride!

But Iger wants so much an opening late 2015 while he is Disney CEO that you may be right, they might have to do some cuts and open the delayed rides later in 2016. But if they do this it'll be a bad strategy, the good one would be to declare that SDL opening will have some delay and open 6 months or one year later and to push back the date until which Iger can stay as Disney CEO.

Anonymous said...

It looks like the very same WDS/DCA/HKDL mistake. They seem not to learn from the past, because the message sent is "save your SDL money for 2016/2017". Awful.

mr.Lime said...

Where did I hear this before?
Oh yeah, when Euro Disney opened its doors in 1992, it was suppose to expand very soon with ...
- The Little Mermaid + Beauty and the Beast in 1994
- Disney-MGM Studios Europe in 1995
- Discovery Mountain in 1996
... because "Euro Disney would attract so many enthousiastic European visitors it would be an immediate success and rapid expansion would be necessary".

Disney was so confident in theirselves they even presented the above attraction list in the opening TV-show of Euro Disney. Well, in the early '90s Disney's market-research appeared to be extremely wrong. And in stead of learning lessons, they opened the very sad DCA, WDS and HKDL ... will SDL be their next big mistake?