Disney is undertaking another round of layoffs tied to its $71.3 billion acquisition of 21st Century Fox, and these are impacting its media distribution business and National Geographic.
According to the Hollywood Reporter, Disney cut about 60 jobs from its media distribution division for Disney and Fox film studios.
According to Variety, Disney is cutting another 70 to 80 jobs at National Geographic. The publication said that Disney is moving certain operations handling live events, travel and publishing for National Geographic and shifting them to other parts of the company.
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The most recent job cuts at Disney arrive as the company continues to work toward achieving the billions in annual cost savings it projected prior to closing the deal for Fox.
Earlier this year, Variety published a report citing Disney and Fox insiders who said that as many as 4,000 jobs could be cut in the process of integrating Fox’s assets into Disney’s operations. As Disney sniffs out $2 billion in cost synergies, the marketing, sales and distribution divisions within Fox’s film studios could be the hardest hit by job cuts.
During Disney’s most recent quarterly earnings call, the company predicted that the acquisition of 21st Century Fox and the impact of taking full operational control of Hulu will have a dilutive impact on its fiscal fourth-quarter earnings per share before purchase accounting of about $0.45 per share. But Disney said it still expects the acquisition to be accretive to EPS before fiscal 2021 and that the company is still on track to realize more than $2 billion in cost synergies by fiscal 2021.