Some good news for Netflix, with subscriber gains in the third quarter.
Hoping for more good news after the first quarter? Netflix’s subscriber additions are down, but it’s not by much.
Netflix reported its earnings on Thursday, with the streaming service losing about 1.6 million subscribers in the period. Not too much, given the fact that subscriber numbers for the final weeks of the previous year were far higher than Netflix said Netflix added 1.6 million in the first three months of this year.
The company’s numbers, however, were not great: Revenue rose just over 27% to $1 billion, from $979 million in the year-ago quarter. That’s a little better than the $1.04 billion in the previous three months, which was up from the $912 million.
Netflix made more money than analysts expected, but its investors weren’t happy, as the stock was down more than 15% premarket on the opening. They shouldn’t get too upset, however, when compared to the market. Netflix’s shares are up about 32% since their March IPO.
Netflix added around 1.6 million new subscribers during the first three months of the 2016, which may sound little, but when you consider the fact that Netflix has more than 11 million members (compared to 1.4 million for Apple), the subscriber growth is pretty impressive.
Netflix’s strong subscriber additions are partly a result of the fact that it was adding more originals, as well as a small boost from the expansion into new territories, like Portugal and Chile.
Netflix also launched a few smaller products.
For those who want to see a clearer picture of the business, Netflix spent more than $12 billion building out its streaming service. The company also gave up $2.8 billion to purchase a stake in international video streaming service Gaikai Inc., which should help with the competition.
Netflix had more than 31 million subscribers at the end of the first quarter.
For the full year, Netflix added about 36 million subscribers, which is up 5% from last year, despite the fact that some of the increases were from one quarter to the next.
Here are the key take