12 Best Blue-Chip Stocks to Buy for the Long Term

The stocks of these high-quality companies look cheap today.

Illustration with coins floating over blue bar graphs
Securities in This Article
Sony Group Corp ADR
(SONY)
Charles Schwab Corp
(SCHW)
Alphabet Inc Class A
(GOOGL)
Microsoft Corp
(MSFT)
The Walt Disney Co
(DIS)

Investors often hold blue-chip stocks at the core of their portfolios. That makes sense. After all, blue-chip companies are leaders in their industries. Their names are familiar to investors.

What Are Blue-Chip Stocks?

Blue-chip stocks are from companies that are large, well-established, and financially sound. These companies have strong brand names and reputations, and they generate dependable earnings. Blue-chip companies usually boast consistent dividends and are often considered less risky, given their financial stability.

However, investors may differ in how they define blue-chip companies. Some investors demand that a blue-chip stock be included in a particular index, such as the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Others may include only dividend-paying companies on their lists of blue-chip stocks. Still others may have specific market-cap thresholds for blue-chip companies.

12 Best Blue-Chip Stocks to Buy for the Long Term

These are the largest firms by market cap on Morningstar’s Best Companies to Own list whose stocks were the most undervalued as of Sept. 22, 2026.

  1. Sony Group SONY
  2. SAP SAP
  3. S&P Global SPGI
  4. Lowe’s LOW
  5. PepsiCo PEP
  6. Alphabet GOOG
  7. Lockheed Martin LMT
  8. Charles Schwab SCHW
  9. Alphabet GOOGL
  10. Amphenol APH
  11. Microsoft MSFT
  12. Disney DIS

To come up with our list of the best blue-chip stocks to buy for the long term, we screened for:

  • Stocks from companies included on Morningstar’s list of the Best Companies to Own. Companies on this list have wide
    Morningstar Economic Moat Ratings
    and predictable cash flows, and they are run by management teams that make smart capital-allocation decisions.
  • Stocks that are undervalued, as measured by our price/fair value metric.
  • Companies with market caps above $100 billion.

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The ADRs of these wide-moat companies are attractive buys today.

Here’s a little more about each of these blue-chip stocks for the long term, including commentary from the Morningstar analysts who cover each company. All data is as of Sept. 22, 2026.

Sony Group

  • Morningstar Price/Fair Value: 0.69
  • Market Capitalization: $138.4 billion
  • Forward Dividend Yield: 0.68%
  • Industry: Consumer Electronics

Consumer electronics firm Sony Group is the most affordable stock on our list of the best blue-chip stocks to buy. Sony Group is a conglomerate with consumer electronics roots, which not only designs, develops, produces, and sells electronic equipment and devices but is also engaged in content businesses, such as console and mobile games, music, and movies. The stock is trading 31% below our fair value estimate of $34 per share.

As technologies and consumer preferences change rapidly, it is generally difficult for consumer electronics companies to build an economic moat. The replacement cycle for digital appliances is usually four to six years, but as most products are commoditized, it is difficult for manufacturers to build an ecosystem that prevents customers from switching to other brands. As a result, Sony’s profitability in electronics has been unstable in the past, while its music, movies, and financial-services businesses have generated solid results.

Over the past decade, Sony has transformed its business model to enable more solid and stable growth by reducing the volatility of the consumer electronics business and by aggressively investing in acquiring content for its entertainment businesses such as music, movies, and games.

In the consumer electronics business, profits are generated from digital cameras and audio equipment, where Sony has strengths, while the TV business is thoroughly focused on avoiding losses by focusing on premium products and strictly managing inventories.

In the music and movie businesses, Sony has been able to seize growth opportunities, such as the expansion of the streaming market, by expanding its content and exploring new artists.

The image sensor business has the largest global market share. The majority of sales come from the mobile market, which is benefiting from the strong demand for improved image quality in smartphone cameras. However, unlike the entertainment businesses, image sensors require high capital investment and research and development, and with such high fixed costs, we believe the profitability of the business is not high enough.

PlayStation is Sony’s largest revenue-generating business. While user migration from PS4 to PS5 is progressing well, rising game development costs and competition from other platforms such as Steam are becoming a concern for the business.

Kazunori Ito, Morningstar director

Read more about Sony Group here.

SAP

  • Morningstar Price/Fair Value: 0.70
  • Market Capitalization: $241.2 billion
  • Forward Dividend Yield: 1.39%
  • Industry: Software-Application

Founded in Germany in 1972 by former IBM employees, SAP is the world’s largest provider of enterprise application software. This cheap stock looks 30% undervalued and has a fair value estimate of $302 per share.

SAP is the world’s largest provider of enterprise application software and global market leader in enterprise resource planning software. The company earns revenue by selling subscriptions for its various cloud-based software-as-a-service products as well as licenses and maintenance fees for on-premises software, which are now being largely phased out. Besides its core ERP products such as S/4HANA, SAP offers well-known back-office software products such as Concur for travel and expense management and Ariba for procurement.

The company was late to the cloud for ERP software but now offers two compelling products: RISE with SAP, which is the private-cloud edition designed for SAP’s large enterprise customers that are transitioning from their SAP on-premises ERP (ECC) to SAP S/4HANA; and GROW with SAP, which is the public cloud edition that is designed for midmarket companies with less complex requirements. We think GROW with SAP fills an important void in SAP’s product offering, as previously SAP’s ERP software was often unattractive to smaller customers, given the implementation costs were just too high. With the launch of these new products, cloud revenue is growing swiftly, and SAP is capturing many new midmarket customers.

SAP is following a land and expand strategy, which is common in the enterprise software market. RISE with SAP and GROW with SAP are the land products, after which the company then upsells and cross-sells more SAP products to these customers, which is much easier in a cloud-based model. The company has yet to release its latest long-term ambitions but expects revenue growth to accelerate at least through 2027, along with rising margins as the cloud business reaches efficient scale.

Rob Hales, Morningstar senior analyst

Read more about SAP here.

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S&P Global

  • Morningstar Price/Fair Value: 0.77
  • Market Capitalization: $118.6 billion
  • Forward Dividend Yield: 0.96%
  • Industry: Financial Data and Stock Exchanges

Next on our list of the best blue-chip stocks to buy is S&P Global. S&P Global provides data and benchmarks to capital and commodity market participants. The stock is trading at a 23% discount to our fair value estimate of $525 per share.

Whether through credit ratings, financial indexes, or commodity price reporting, S&P Global has established a wide moat from its data-driven benchmarks. Given the embedded nature of these benchmarks, S&P enjoys a strong competitive position and strong operating margins. In February 2022, S&P completed its $44 billion acquisition of IHS Markit. We believe IHS Markit’s recurring revenue model diversified S&P’s revenue but also limited revenue upside. We note that much of IHS Markit has been divested or spun off, such as Engineering Solutions, OSTTRA, and Mobility Global.

Bond issuance volume is a key revenue driver for S&P’s ratings business, which makes up almost 45% of the firm’s adjusted operating income. Over the long term, we believe high-single-digit revenue growth, driven by nominal GDP growth and pricing, is a reasonable expectation for this business. Regulatory issues are part of the backdrop of the firm’s ratings business, but regulations can often benefit established players.

S&P’s other segments include market intelligence (22% of adjusted operating income), S&P Dow Jones indexes (18%), and energy (16%). While this business is moaty, in our view, we see limited synergy with S&P’s other segments. Market intelligence revenue is recurring but faces stout competition from other providers such as Bloomberg, LSE Group (Refinitiv), and FactSet. The indexes segment revolves around the S&P 500 index and is monetized from index subscriptions to active asset managers, license fees for passive exchange-traded funds and mutual funds, and royalties from exchange-traded options and futures. Energy consists of S&P’s legacy Platts business and IHS Markit’s resources segment.

After spinning off its education business in 2013 and rebranding to S&P Global from McGraw Hill Financial, the firm has focused on expanding margins. Adjusted operating margin rose to 55% in 2021 from 34% in 2013, driven by streamlining operations and operating leverage, with strong interim revenue growth. However, given the inclusion of IHS Markit, which had some lower-margin businesses, we expect S&P Global’s adjusted operating margins to normalize to the low- to mid-50s, below historical peaks.

Rajiv Bhatia, Morningstar analyst

Read more about S&P Global here.

Lowe’s

  • Morningstar Price/Fair Value: 0.77
  • Market Capitalization: $110 billion
  • Forward Dividend Yield: 2.55%
  • Industry: Home Improvement Retail

Lowe’s is the second-largest home improvement retailer globally, with 1,761 stores in the US, after the 2023 divestiture of its Canadian locations. This cheap stock looks 23% undervalued and has a fair value estimate of $255 per share.

Lowe’s is the second-largest home improvement retailer globally, set to capture around $92 billion in sales in fiscal 2026. With a perpetual focus on retail fundamentals (merchandising, operational efficiency, supply chain improvements, omnichannel shopping experience, and customer engagement), Lowe’s has been able to manage costs while maintaining its low-cost position. The firm retains some of its cost savings and passes the rest on to its customers through everyday low prices, creating a flywheel effect. Intangible asset and scale-based cost advantages support a wide moat.

After Marvin Ellison took the helm in 2018, a full overhaul of Lowe’s C-suite, board, and merchandising team ensued. The team implemented a perpetual productivity plan, which has led to gains in profit margin. Thanks to the institutionalization of processes that were inefficient and the divestiture of underperforming lines, we expect Lowe’s adjusted operating margin to reach 11.6% in 2026, up from 9.1% in 2019. We think operational and cultural changes position Lowe’s for more consistent returns ahead.

Lowe’s updated its long-term financial goals in December 2024, targeting yearly operating margin and ROIC improvement of 30 basis points and 50 basis points, respectively, beginning in 2026. However, we expect this to be sidetracked in 2026 by the acquisition of Foundation Building Materials, which, while driving faster sales growth, will drag on return on invested capital and profit margin. The firm is also facing transitory near-term headwinds, including a cautious consumer on the sales side and inflationary costs (fuel, transportation) on the expense side, along with elevated mortgage rates.

We think Lowe’s operating margin and ROIC expansion goals are reasonable in the long term, given the structural changes that have occurred, once the home spending environment normalizes. In our opinion, aging housing stock and continued demand for professional home repair services set the firm up for further sales growth and cost leverage, bolstered by continuous process upgrades to better serve pros. Additionally, Lowe’s still has opportunities in underserved categories, like pet and workwear.

Jaime M. Katz, Morningstar senior analyst

Read more about Lowe’s here.

PepsiCo

  • Morningstar Price/Fair Value: 0.78
  • Market Capitalization: $179.1 billion
  • Forward Dividend Yield: 4.51%
  • Industry: Beverages-Nonalcoholic

PepsiCo is a global leader in snacks and beverages, owning well-known household brands including Pepsi, Mountain Dew, Gatorade, Lay’s, Cheetos, and Doritos, among others. The stock is trading at a 22% discount to our fair value estimate of $169 per share.

PepsiCo’s tight retail relationships on the back of strong beverage and snack brands, coupled with massive distribution and procurement scale, underpin our wide moat rating, and we foresee this position as unwavering. For one, we see Pepsi’s snack lineup as well-placed to bolster its share by leveraging unrivalled brand awareness, operational scale, and retail relations. Within its beverage mix, the firm is exploring a variety of options from nascent, in-house brands to brand licensing from third-party category leaders to expand its sales exposure in nonsparkling categories. This can add to the firm’s distribution clout and augment its carbonated drinks that have struggled thus far to narrow the gap with wide-moat Coca-Cola.

Growth has stalled over the past two years, which we attributed to sluggish performance in the North America snack business amid demand challenges and cost inflation. This more than offset steady mid-single-digit organic sales expansion internationally as the firm invests more to tap rising demand in Latin America, Asia, and Africa. To reinvigorate growth in North America and reinforce long-term competitive positioning, we believe the firm has prioritized health-focused product innovation, increased investment in value offerings and digital marketing for better consumer engagement, in addition to pruning its portfolio to sharpen the focus on core offerings. The strategic roadmap looks cogent, although we think execution will be key to the turnaround and the initiatives to take time to bear fruit.

Longer term, while we think demand for PepsiCo’s food and beverage products tends to be resilient throughout economic cycles, risks and uncertainties nonetheless abound. The firm faces challenges that include the inroads from e-commerce and hard discounters that introduce more competition and disrupt the pricing structure, and consumption pattern shifts driven by a more mobile lifestyle and higher health awareness. That said, a nimble and pragmatic approach, coupled with inherent brand prowess and manufacturing/distribution scale, should enable the firm to navigate the evolving competitive landscape while enhancing its returns.

Kristoffer Inton, Morningstar senior analyst

Read more about PepsiCo here.

Alphabet

  • Morningstar Price/Fair Value: 0.80
  • Market Capitalization: $4.3 trillion
  • Forward Dividend Yield: 0.25%
  • Industry: Internet Content and Information

Alphabet is a holding company that wholly owns internet giant Google. The stock is trading at a 20% discount to our fair value estimate of $433 per share.

We view Alphabet as a conglomerate of stellar businesses. With solutions ranging from advertising to cloud computing and self-driving cars, Alphabet has built itself into a true behemoth, generating tens of billions of dollars in free cash flow annually. While antitrust concerns around Alphabet’s core search business have made headlines, we retain our confidence in Alphabet’s overall strength and foresee the firm remaining at the forefront of a variety of verticals, including search, artificial intelligence, video, and cloud computing.

Alphabet’s core strategy is to preserve its strong advertising business, with the majority of advertising revenue coming from Google Search. To that end, the firm has invested considerably over the years to improve its search capabilities, ensuring that its search engine remains deeply embedded in how hundreds of millions of users access information on the web.

We see the firm’s investments in AI as a continuation of this effort to safeguard its core product, Google Search. We believe that by leveraging generative AI, Google can not only improve its own search quality via features such as AI overviews but also improve its advertising business by augmenting its ability to target customers with relevant ads.

On the antitrust front, we don’t foresee a material deterioration in Google’s search business resulting from governmental or judicial intervention. While there is a range of possible outcomes depending on what remedial steps are imposed, we think it is likely that Google will maintain its leadership position in search and text-based advertising in the long term.

Beyond search, we have a positive outlook on Alphabet’s cloud computing platform, Google Cloud Platform. We believe increased migration of workloads to the public cloud and an uptick in the deployment and usage of AI are key growth drivers for GCP over the next five years. At the same time, we believe that as GCP scales, it will become a more important part of Alphabet’s overall business, both from a top-line and profitability perspective.

Malik Ahmed Khan, Morningstar senior analyst

Read more about Alphabet here.

Lockheed Martin

  • Morningstar Price/Fair Value: 0.80
  • Market Capitalization: $120.6 billion
  • Forward Dividend Yield: 2.64%
  • Industry: Aerospace and Defense

Lockheed Martin is the world’s largest defense contractor and has dominated the Western market for high-end fighter aircraft since it won the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program in 2001. This cheap stock looks 20% undervalued and has a fair value estimate of $650 per share.

Lockheed derived nearly 72% of its $75 billion in 2025 sales servicing contracts from the US military, with the largest annual budget on Earth, and stands to operate the largest defense procurement program ever awarded (F-35) through the 2060s. Thus, as a bet on the defense industry, Lockheed is hard to beat. Biggest isn’t always best, but Lockheed (and investors) benefit from the sheer scale of its tens of billions of dollars of contracts that provide defined decadeslong revenue and profit streams.

Lockheed should benefit from recent and foreseeable increases in US defense spending, driven by the Pentagon’s goal to modernize the military’s ability to counter aggression from multiple so-called great power rivals, namely China and Russia, while also managing threats from terrorism and hot spots like Iran and North Korea.

Defense budgets usually ebb and flow with a nation’s wealth and its perception of danger. In the US, both have been on the rise, and among many allies, notably NATO countries as well as Korea and Japan, geopolitics is leading to larger military budgets than we’ve seen for decades. For perspective, we estimate that the portions of the US defense budget relevant to contractors like Lockheed and its many subcontractors shrank between 2011-16 by 3.7% annualized while these budgets grew between 2016-24 by 5.8% annualized. We think the contractors’ budget will continue to grow with modernization and robust demand from the Trump administration in the near term but should moderate to around 2.5%-3.0% growth over the long term.

We think Lockheed Martin’s exposure to the F-35 program, hypersonic missiles, and the militarization of space align it well with areas of spending prioritized in the US defense budget. In the current environment, though, the constraint on the defense sector’s opportunity is not access to defense spending or the size of budgets, but rather the ability to deploy enough skilled employees (often requiring security clearance) and specialized components and materials (that are lately in short supply) to execute the programs on time and on budget.

Nicolas Owens, Morningstar analyst

Read more about Lockheed Martin here.

Charles Schwab

  • Morningstar Price/Fair Value: 0.81
  • Market Capitalization: $173.5 billion
  • Forward Dividend Yield: 1.28%
  • Industry: Capital Markets

Charles Schwab is one of the largest retail-oriented financial-services companies in the US, with $11.9 trillion in client assets across its brokerage, banking, asset management, custody, financial advisory, and wealth management businesses at the end of 2025. The stock is trading at a 19% discount to our fair value estimate of $124 per share.

Charles Schwab’s strategy rests on three pillars: deepening client relationships, leveraging scale to drive efficiency, and delivering on what the company calls the brilliant basics. We view this as an appropriate approach.

Schwab has done an excellent job over the years in deepening its customer relationships by building a robust, intuitive trading and advisory platform with an ever-expanding menu of services. From its roots as a retail brokerage, Schwab has expanded into mutual fund distribution, proprietary and low-cost asset management products, lending, retirement accounts, and most recently, wealth management. As a result, it has emerged as a premier asset gatherer in the industry, with 5%-6% annual organic net asset growth over the past decade (adjusted for TD Ameritrade), driving its total client assets to $11.9 trillion at the end of 2025.

With Schwab servicing just 40%-45% of customer assets, by our estimates, we see plenty of runway for future growth as it adds in-demand products such as alternative-investment products, cryptocurrency trading, and continues to expand its still-small loan book, encouraging clients to consolidate their financial lives with Schwab. Its attention to the brilliant basics affords Schwab the ability to credibly introduce new products and organically increase its scale.

As we see it, increasing scale and reducing cost to serve is critical in a financial-services industry that continues to see fee compression as transparency and the availability of low-cost alternatives increase. Schwab drove its expense/client assets ratio down to just 0.12% during the most recent fiscal year, head and shoulders above the 0.47% and 0.37% average among its online brokerage and wirehouse competitors, respectively (by our calculations). Maintaining its position as a low-cost operator will be essential. The addition of new products allows Schwab to spread investments across a broader base of assets in a way that higher-cost peers simply cannot, entrenching its competitive edge.

Overall, Schwab’s best-in-class efficiency and attractive product suite position the firm well to continue to gain market share in a competitive financial-services industry.

Sean Dunlop, Morningstar director

Read more about Charles Schwab here.

Alphabet

  • Morningstar Price/Fair Value: 0.81
  • Market Capitalization: $4.3 trillion
  • Forward Dividend Yield: 0.25%
  • Industry: Internet Content and Information

Alphabet is a holding company that wholly owns internet giant Google. This cheap stock looks 19% undervalued and has a fair value estimate of $433 per share.

We view Alphabet as a conglomerate of stellar businesses. With solutions ranging from advertising to cloud computing and self-driving cars, Alphabet has built itself into a true behemoth, generating tens of billions of dollars in free cash flow annually. While antitrust concerns around Alphabet’s core search business have made headlines, we retain our confidence in Alphabet’s overall strength and foresee the firm remaining at the forefront of a variety of verticals, including search, artificial intelligence, video, and cloud computing.

Alphabet’s core strategy is to preserve its strong advertising business, with the majority of advertising revenue coming from Google Search. To that end, the firm has invested considerably over the years to improve its search capabilities, ensuring that its search engine remains deeply embedded in how hundreds of millions of users access information on the web.

We see the firm’s investments in AI as a continuation of this effort to safeguard its core product, Google Search. We believe that by leveraging generative AI, Google can not only improve its own search quality via features such as AI overviews, but also improve its advertising business by augmenting its ability to target customers with relevant ads.

On the antitrust front, we don’t foresee a material deterioration in Google’s search business resulting from governmental or judicial intervention. While there is a range of possible outcomes depending on what remedial steps are imposed, we think it is likely that Google will maintain its leadership position in search and text-based advertising in the long term.

Beyond search, we have a positive outlook on Alphabet’s cloud computing platform, Google Cloud Platform. We believe increased migration of workloads to the public cloud and an uptick in the deployment and usage of AI are key growth drivers for GCP over the next five years. At the same time, we believe that as GCP scales, it will become a more important part of Alphabet’s overall business, both from a top-line and profitability perspective.

Malik Ahmed Khan, Morningstar senior analyst

Read more about Alphabet here.

Amphenol

  • Morningstar Price/Fair Value: 0.83
  • Market Capitalization: $204.3 billion
  • Forward Dividend Yield: 0.60%
  • Industry: Electronic Components

Amphenol is a global supplier of connectors, sensors, and interconnect systems. This cheap stock looks 17% undervalued and has a fair value estimate of $100 per share.

We think Amphenol is a differentiated connector supplier, an excellent operator, and an exceptional steward of shareholder capital. It has numerous competitors in the fragmented electrical component industry, but its broad array of end markets allows Amphenol to expand its top line even in an individual market downturn. We think the firm’s singular ability to effect cost controls gives it the highest operating margins of its peer group, allowing it to quickly bring its numerous acquisitions up to firmwide profitability.

Amphenol provides connectors with high performance and reliability that are specialized for mission-critical applications in harsh environments. As such, we think its customer relationships are very sticky, with customers facing high financial and opportunity costs from switching to another component supplier, as well as the risk of component failure. We believe customers rely on Amphenol as a design partner to supply cutting-edge products and enable new capabilities in end applications. As older products become commoditized, the firm can maintain high prices by introducing new designs for new sockets. As a result of these switching costs and pricing power, we believe Amphenol possesses a Morningstar Economic Moat Rating of wide.

We expect Amphenol to maintain its diversified end-market structure and expand its technological and geographic breadth through mergers and acquisitions, which have funded about one-third of the firm’s historical top-line growth. We expect artificial intelligence revenue to become the firm’s primary growth driver over the medium term but remain less than half of sales, with excellent placement in server configurations from Nvidia and others. As Amphenol grows, we expect it will maintain its best-in-class operating margins by expanding its decentralized organizational structure. The firm operates through more than 140 general managers, who exercise significant autonomy to respond to end customers’ needs and manage costs; we expect this count to grow as the firm makes acquisitions and expands into new markets.

William Kerwin, Morningstar senior analyst

Read more about Amphenol here.

Microsoft

  • Morningstar Price/Fair Value: 0.83
  • Market Capitalization: $3.7 trillion
  • Forward Dividend Yield: 0.79%
  • Industry: Software-Infrastructure

Microsoft develops and licenses consumer and enterprise software. This cheap stock looks 17% undervalued and has a fair value estimate of $600 per share.

Microsoft is one of three public cloud providers that can deliver a wide variety of PaaS/IaaS solutions at scale. Based on its investment in OpenAI, the company has also emerged as a leader in AI. Microsoft has also enjoyed great success in upselling users on higher-priced Office 365 versions, notably to include advanced telephony features. These factors have combined to drive a more focused company that offers impressive revenue growth with high and expanding margins and deepening ties with customers. We expect solid overall growth despite the company’s size, and slightly improving margins over time to drive the stock.

With rapid growth at massive scale, Azure is clearly the centerpiece of the new Microsoft. Azure has several distinct advantages, including that it offers customers a painless way to experiment and move select workloads to the cloud, creating seamless hybrid cloud environments. Since existing customers remain in the same Microsoft environment, applications and data are easily moved from on-premises to the cloud. Microsoft can also leverage its massive installed base of all Microsoft solutions as a touchpoint for an Azure move. Azure also is an excellent launching point for secular trends in AI, business intelligence, and Internet of Things, as it continues to launch new services centered around these broad themes. With AI in focus, Microsoft is well positioned to become the orchestration layer for the agentic age.

Microsoft has moved beyond the on-premises focus to cloud delivery, so the pain of a model transition is a thing of the past. Office 365 retains its virtual monopoly in office productivity software, which we do not expect to change in the foreseeable future. Lastly, the company is also pushing its gaming business increasingly toward recurring revenues and residing in the cloud. We believe that customers will continue to drive the transition from on-premises to cloud solutions, and revenue growth will remain robust with margins continuing to improve for the next several years.

Dan Romanoff, Morningstar senior analyst

Read more about Microsoft here.

Disney

  • Morningstar Price/Fair Value: 0.83
  • Market Capitalization: $179.3 billion
  • Forward Dividend Yield: 1.44%
  • Industry: Entertainment

Entertainment company Disney rounds out our list of best blue-chip stocks to buy. Disney operates in three global business segments: entertainment, sports, and experiences. The stock is 17% undervalued relative to our fair value estimate of $125 per share.

With heavy investment and good execution in parks and experiences and streaming, Disney has transitioned its business so that the ongoing, swift decline in traditional pay television is no longer a critical threat to the company. Its diverse portfolio of successful businesses sets it apart from its traditional media peers.

With full ownership of Hulu to go along with Disney+, Disney has diverse streaming entertainment content and a global presence that positions it in the upper tier of global streaming platforms, with a global subscriber base we believe trails only Netflix and Amazon.com. More importantly, the firm has rapidly improved streaming profitability, swinging from a $2.5 billion operating loss in fiscal 2023 to a $1.3 billion profit in 2025. We expect that these streaming services will generate more profit for Disney than its linear entertainment networks in fiscal 2026, with streaming and linear entertainment each making up a midteens percentage of total company profit.

The linear TV medium is still important for ESPN, but with its rollout of a streaming alternative for linear ESPN programming, the ongoing demise of traditional pay TV won’t take ESPN down with it. We don’t view streaming ESPN as a material growth driver but rather see it as protection against a decline in sports revenue, as consumers now have an alternative to access ESPN even when they no longer want the pay TV bundle. Sports also contribute a midteens percentage of total operating profit.

Experiences, which includes theme parks and cruises, remains a growth business and has consumed a heightened level of investment in recent years. After introducing three new cruise ships within 16 months in fiscal 2025-26, Disney now has eight ships in operation, with another five in the works. A licensing arrangement for a Disney park in Abu Dhabi that should open around the turn of the decade provides further opportunity for incremental growth. This comes as Disney’s existing parks and cruises remain popular, and the intellectual property it owns ensures competitors can’t fully replicate Disney vacations.

Matthew Dolgin, Morningstar senior analyst

Read more about Disney here.

How to Find More of the Best Blue-Chip Stocks to Buy

Investors who’d like to extend their search for top blue-chip stocks can do the following:

This article was generated with the help of automation and reviewed by Morningstar editors. Learn more about Morningstar’s use of automation.

The author or authors do not own shares in any securities mentioned in this article. Find out about Morningstar’s editorial policies.

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