Disney to bring delegation from China to Orlando as design of Shanghai Disneyland continues

The Walt Disney Co. plans to bring a delegation from Shanghai to Orlando early next month for a series of briefings with executives at Walt Disney World, as the company accelerates design of its first resort on mainland China.

The meetings, which will include tours of Disney World’s fire and emergency-response operations and water-quality-monitoring labs, come with Disney attempting to finalize an agreement to build Shanghai Disneyland in the world’s most populous country.

Studying Disney World’s infrastructure may be important as Disney is believed to be planning a multi-park destination resort in Shanghai that could ultimately rival its Orlando property in size — much larger than Disney’s other theme-park resorts in California, Paris, Tokyo and Hong Kong.

“We’re just going to show them what we do,” said Ray Maxwell, district administrator for the Reedy Creek Improvement District, the government district responsible for emergency response, environmental monitoring and other functions at Disney World.

Maxwell said the briefings that involve Reedy Creek are designed to show “what are the needs of developing a theme park and what are the ongoing needs.”

Burbank, Calif.-based Disney announced earlier this month that it had won approval from the Chinese government for the project. It is now negotiating a final construction and operating agreement with local partners in Shanghai.

A spokesman for Walt Disney Parks and Resorts declined to provide further details of the meetings, which are scheduled for the first week of December. “We’ve hosted Chinese delegations at Disney locations in Florida and California on multiple occasions since we began negotiations more than a decade ago,” spokesman John Nicoletti said.

Disney says it currently plans an initial phase that will include a Magic Kingdom-style theme park and other amenities, likely one or more hotels and a shopping-and-dining district. It has declined to provide further details so far.

“We are in a design and development phase, though, and are giving considerable thought to what the park will look like and will work closely with our partners in Shanghai in that regard, particularly once the agreement is finalized,” Disney Co. Chief Executive Officer Bob Iger said during a conference call last week to discuss Disney’s fourth-quarter earnings.

The first phase of Shanghai Disneyland will reportedly cost about $3.5 billion and take between three and five years to build. Disney is expected to own an approximately 40 percent stake in the resort.

It will be built on a roughly 1,000-acre tract in Shanghai’s Pudong district, giving Disney ample room for future expansion. Disney World encompasses about 26,000 acres, though more than 60 percent of the land is wetlands that cannot be developed.

“Given the Magic Kingdom context, Disney and its partners appear to not want to end up building too small a park, as happened in Hong Kong,” Deutsche Bank analyst Doug Mitchelson wrote in a research note earlier this month. “It also sounds, given the term ‘initial phase,’ that if the first park is successful, they are open to building a multi-park destination.”

Shanghai Disneyland is of enormous importance to Disney. Chinese restrictions on foreign media prevent the company from building its brand with television, making the theme park potentially its most effective means of converting the country’s more than 1.3 billion residents into consumers of Disney DVDs, toys, video games and more.

“This could be the key toehold in China that Disney has been seeking,” Mitchelson said.

In the conference call last week, Iger said, “With 1.3 billion people, increasing affluence and one of the world’s most dynamic cultures, China is an important and promising country for us and will only become more so in the years to come.”

Jason Garcia can be reached at jrgarcia@orlandosentinel.com or 407-420-5414.