Netflix took a risk by cracking down on password sharing. But the calculation works out, the streaming giant is rapidly gaining more customers.
Netflix continues to grow rapidly and clearly exceeded Wall Street’s expectations in the last quarter. The video streaming market leader added 9.33 million subscribers in the last quarter. On average, analysts had only expected an increase of around 4.9 million customers. Supported by strong user growth, Netflix also exceeded forecasts in terms of sales and profits.
Netflix now has 269.6 million paying customers worldwide. The upward trend last year was triggered, among other things, by the crackdown on password sharing across households. At the same time, from next year onwards, the service no longer wants to provide information about the current number of users every quarter. For market observers, this has so far been an important indicator of competition with Disney and other streaming providers. Netflix shares temporarily fell by around four percent in after-hours trading.
Netflix, meanwhile, signaled that growth would continue. For the current quarter, the service promised a year-on-year increase in sales of around 16 percent. In the last quarter, revenues rose by around 15 percent year-on-year to $9.37 billion (8.8 billion euros). Quarterly profit jumped to $2.33 billion from $1.3 billion a year ago.
Source: Stern
