Hulu could be worth more than $30 billion.
That’s according to Comcast CEO Brain Roberts, who spoke on Wednesday at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia + Technology investor conference. When Hulu and all its assets were assessed by Disney five years ago, it deemed Hulu to be worth $27.5 billion. Roberts argued Hulu is “way more valuable” now compared to then.
Comcast said the spike in value means they could be underpaid for their shares of Hulu.
“We’ve seen analyst reports that a buyer, depending on who they were, if it was to scale them up, they could have a couple billion dollars, or who knows what, of synergy,” Roberts said. “Just that piece of the synergy and the churn benefit could be worth $30 billion. And that’s before you ascribe any value to the actual Hulu. And of course when you go into one of these really robust auctions — and I think if you were selling all of this as-is — there’d be a line of bidders around the block to actually buy all the content, all the bundling of Hulu, that business we’ve never seen. And so usually buyers in robust auctions pay for it all, and the seller gets all the benefits of the synergy.”
Disney has been in talks with Comcast to buy out its remaining one-third ownership of Hulu. Originally, the companies planned to hash out an agreement for Disney to buy Comcast’s share in January of next year. Now, they’ve modified the agreement to begin discussion on September 30, Roberts said, as reported by Variety.
Goldman Sachs is involved with the appraisal process, which Roberts says will take time to reach a deal. Disney and Comcast can force the other to accept a deal by January, although no timeframe has been set to finalize the appraisal.
“No one’s ever sold a pure play or auctioned off a pure-play streaming asset that’s in this kind of position; that’s a scarce, kingmaker asset,” said Roberts.