One turbulent year on, plans for Disneyland Abu Dhabi remain unchanged.

Disney

Disney has confirmed in a letter to shareholders that its plans to develop a theme park in Abu Dhabi are on track one year after the groundbreaking project was announced.

The theme park in Abu Dhabi will be Disney's seventh resort worldwide and its first in the Middle East. At the time of the announcement Disney's chief executive Josh D'Amaro said that it will also be the most advanced and interactive destination in the company's portfolio. It takes more than the wave of a magic wand to pull this off and he told Reuters that a project of this scale could take a year or two to design and another four to six years to build.

Bearing that in mind, the current conflict in the Middle East is merely a blip as it has only been taking place for two months. Acknowledging this timeframe, D'Amaro said in the letter that "the strategic logic of our Abu Dhabi plans is unchanged. Major new theme parks are necessarily long-term in nature given the lead time of these projects, and this investment approach has consistently benefited our business."

Disney announced today that theme parks helped it to beat analysts’ expectations as it hit revenue of $25.2 billion in the second quarter with net income of $2.7 billion. Abu Dhabi will give this a glow in years to come as D’Amaro noted that the project has a "capital-light model". The resort will be fully funded, built and operated by Miral, a government-backed developer which has become one of the world's leading theme park operators, alongside Disney and Universal, as this report explained.

Not only does Disney not have to foot the bill for the park but it will receive royalties so it is a new source of cashflow for the company. Abu Dhabi is located far enough away from Disney's existing parks that it won't cannibalize their attendance. However, it has a huge catchment area with a third of the world's population located within a four-hour flight.

For all these reasons, the plans have had a magic touch on Disney's stock price which surged 10% on the announcement. It is a win-win.

Abu Dhabi's collection of world-class theme parks includes SeaWorld, Warner Bros. World, Ferrari World and Yas Waterworld. The sprawling sites are at the heart of a strategy to diversify its economy which has been built on fossil fuels. As the city's reserves began to dwindle, it started to heavily invest in its leisure infrastructure in order to tempt tourists and generate a new revenue stream from them.

Theme parks are at the vanguard of this strategy as they draw tourists from afar and the colossal complexes have the capacity to welcome millions of people. The more people who visit, the greater the local spending and the more diverse Abu Dhabi's economy becomes. As the most well-known name in the theme park industry, Disney has the greatest potential to drive tourism which explains why Miral's dynamic chief executive Mohamed Al Zaabi too has confirmed that the company is committed to the project.

The diversification strategy has cast a powerful spell. Abu Dhabi is the capital city of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) which recently announced that its non-oil exports climbed 25% last year to $71.3 billion.

Testimony to the power of its plan, UAE Investment Minister Mohamed Alsuwaidi told AFP today that the country's sovereign wealth funds are still investing "at home and abroad" despite the conflict.

"Our sovereign investors continue to operate with the same long-term mandate they have always held, a posture of steady, disciplined deployment," he said. Doing this while conflict is going on isn’t child's play but the non-oil exports show that it really is the way to a happy ending.

Additional reporting by Chris Sylt