Who will be Disney’s next CEO?

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Good morning from the Financial Times. Today is Tuesday, February third, and this is your FT News briefing. France finally has a budget, and Disney's CEO search is entering a whole new world. Plus Societe Generale used to be a punchline in European banking. Socgen is not the problem child anymore, so so what what is it exactly? Like how do you define them? And I think

Yet to really answer that question. We'll take a crack at that one in a bit. I'm Mark Filipino, and here's the news you need to start your day.

The French government had a rowdy Monday night. Prime Minister Sébastien Le Cornu survived a no-confidence vote, and the country passed a deficit-cutting budget for 2026. Le Cornu is President Emmanuel Macron's seventh prime minister, and this revolving door of PMs partly exists because they were unable to cut the country's deficit. France has the third widest deficit in the Eurozone.

Le Corneux got this budget over the line by using a constitutional power that allows the government to enact a budget without parliamentary support. However, it has to survive a no confidence vote. French politics threw the country's bond market into disarray last year, but it recovered over the past couple of weeks on the expectation that this budget would pass.

You know what they say, if the glass slipper fits, make'em CEO. Disney is on the hunt for a new chief executive. The company will hold a meeting later this week to discuss who will take the home from current CEO Bob Iger. The FT's Los Angeles bureau chief Chris Grimes has more on this. Hi, Chris. Hi there. So do we know who the favorite is to replace Iger? Well the talk has uh been centered on two people at Disney.

uh who are internal candidates. One is Josh Damara who uh is the head of the theme parks division or they call it the experiences division, which is theme parks and increasingly cruise ships. Demorrow's been overseeing this rapid expansion of the cruise ship line. So this is Where the growth and where the money is going, Josh DeMaro has been given a sixty billion dollar budget to expand the experiences business.

And then the other candidate is Dana Walden. Dana Walden's a longtime TV executive at Disney. She's uh been overseeing Disney Plus and Hulu. Yesterday they they posted really strong growth. Um but she also s oversees the linear TV business, which is really kind of managing a declining business. How important, Chris, is it that Disney gets this succession plan right? Well, succession has been a really fraught process uh at Disney, as you know. I mean, Iger has been in the job since 2005.

He re-upped a number of times. Finally he stepped down in 2020, but r remained involved in some capacity and really d only only handed over the keys to Bob Chapek. in twenty twenty-two. Um and you may remember Bob Chapik didn't stay in that job for very much longer. He was ousted in November of twenty twenty two and Iger returned. To try to write the ship. And and write the ship he did, right? I I mean uh Disney has really thrived since he came back as CEO.

Well, thrived. I think some parts of it have thrived. Definitely the theme parks have been a highlight. Uh other parts have just been a matter of uh restructuring and setting priorities. But you know, he's been dealing with the things that his competitors have been dealing with, which is the rapid decline. of traditional T V which was a cash cow for forever until uh the last few years. And then he's had a lot of

headaches from the Trump administration over the past year. You know, he sued A B C uh and they had to settle. So it's you know, it's not The company, it's not the environment that Bob Iger knew when h in his first stint as CEO. So Chris, whether it's Josh DeMarro or Dana Walden What will the next CEO of Disney have to work on when they take over? Uh I think one of the main questions that the company's going to face is whether Disney as it's currently composed

needs to be broken up. I mean this is kind of a radical idea, but Warner Brothers and Comcast are uh spinning off their cable TV businesses which have been a drag on them. Iger and Dana Walden have believed that having the linear TV business has been good. You can show something like Abbott Elementary, a popular show on ABC.

It can go on A B C and also on Hulu, right? They feel like that's a a better model, but We'll see if the next CEO has a look at at that and says, No, actually traditional T V is just too big of a drag and we need to we need to spin it off. That's the FT's Chris Grimes in LA. Thanks so much, Chris. Thank you.

President Donald Trump said yesterday that the US will lower tariffs on India. He and Prime Minister Narendra Modi made the deal after India agreed to stop buying Russian oil. India imports about ninety percent of its oil from Russia, and Trump says that it's fueling Moscow's war machine against Ukraine.

Now we should point out that even with this change, US tariffs on India are still at 18%. But the new rate is way lower than the 50% that it was at, which was one of the highest levels in the world. Trump said in a truth social post yesterday that he spoke with Modi about potentially buying more oil from the US and even Venezuela.

It might be time to start calling Societe General the comeback kid. The French bank used to be considered the problem child of European banking, but its stock price has tripled over the past two years. Here to tell us how SockGen dragged itself back from the brink is the FT Sarah White in Paris. Hi, Sarah. Hi there. So a lot of this success is attributed to Slavomir Krupa, who took over as CEO in twenty twenty three. Give us a sense of what things looked like back then.

Minstokgen had been for fifteen years under the same CEO previously, Frederick Auder, and he had taken over in the wake of the biggest calamity to ever hit this bank in two thousand eight. when they discovered they had a rogue trader. They had an enormous amount of, you know, several billion euros in losses at the time.

they recovered from the losses, but it shook the bank so profoundly that under Udea for the last you know, for fifteen years, it's just been a kind of steady stream of cutbacks and restructurings and and slow sort of shrinkage and I think by the time Slavomir Cruper took over, it was France's third biggest bank. It was perpetually seen as a a potential takeover target and

Whenever there was a problem in European banking, everybody would always kinda go, Oh, Sokgen may be next kind of thing. So then how did Krupa turn things around when he became CEO? It wasn't immediate for Cooper, so in in his first few months he basically said, I have to present realistic targets. Um so I'm projecting very minimal, you know, 0% revenue growth in the next two years. What I need to do is rebuild capital and cut costs.

And actually when he presented that, um, investors hated it. But what happened next was that he delivered on those targets kind of one by one. So he defined a cost target and he hit it and then he surpassed it. He said he was gonna rebuild capital, so he sold off some non core divisions. And I think that was actually a change for the bank as well. It had a bit of an issue of, you know, keep like over promising and and then

always slightly failing to impress on that count. So so that sort of recipe, plus actually cutting cost, have worked magic for him when people have seen that it's, you know, he's consistently delivering on that. And how does SOCGen's turnaround fit in with what's going on with French banking more broadly? So French banks have had a little bit of a of a rough ride of late, except for Sokgen, which is kind of the remarkable part of this story, is that they've always been the lame duck here.

You know, investors are worried about taxes going up in France. Instability always hits bank shares. So they've been a bit more selective on bank shares. And in that mix a lot of them have chosen to focus on, you know, Socgen's turnaround and so that's favoured Socgen and hasn't been as good for some of their big rivals. So so notably B and P

which it has to be said is a much bigger bank than Socgen. Their shares have really lagged their peers across Europe and have lagged that big turnaround of SOCGEN in in the last year. Um BNP specifically has had a few of its own internal issues. So it's had um a court case relating to its uh business in Sudan that hasn't gone its way.

So over the past eighteen months or so it's had its own series of of problems. So Krupa, as we mentioned before, obviously had a lot of success improving Socjen's share price. What's next for the bank and for him? I mean he still has a long way to go to show that this turnaround is sustainable. For the most part it's been focused on cost cuts so far. But their cost to income ratio is still

far higher than it should be and compared to other European banks. So he still had to deliver a little bit more there. And then one thing I've heard from, you know, investors and analysts is that, you know, thus far there was a kind of reset. But they they want to hear a bit more about growth. They have some assets, so they have um an online bank called Busser Bank. That's done extremely well in France, better than any any competitors. So that will be one engine for growth.

But they you know, they remain a a kind of mid sized European bank and okay, Socgen is not the Prodom child anymore, so so what what is it exactly? Like how do you define them? And I think he's yet to really answer that question. Sarah White is the FT's Paris correspondent. Thanks so much, Sarah. Thank you. You can read more on all these stories for free when you click the links in our show notes. This has been your daily FT News briefing. Check back tomorrow for the latest business news.

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