Netflix is still growing after last year’s explosion during the pandemic and lockdowns. But the quarterly results reported yesterday by the group partially disappointed market expectations. This is the case of new subscribers, which as of June 30th were 1.54 million: better than the 1.12 million expected by the company but lower than the 1.75 million expected by most analysts. The total number of subscribers globally has risen to 209 million but the loss of 430,000 users in the United States and Canada, the two most profitable markets, is worrying. Even the earnings per share, of $ 2.97 (1.35 billion in absolute values), against the $ 3.16 forecast by the consensus (from $ 1.59 per share or 720 million a year ago) did not meet analysts’ expectations. ) while turnover slightly beat forecasts to 7.34 billion from 7.32 billion in the same quarter of 2020. The gap between the company’s expectations and those of analysts threatens to widen further over the next few months.
For the third quarter, the company currently expects 3.5 million new subscribers while analysts expect growth of at least five million new users and as much as 9 million in the fourth quarter. Meanwhile, Netflix has indicated that it wants to diversify its strategy and its offer, starting with gaming, even if this development is not seen as a source of new revenue but, for now, more as a way of further retaining customers by providing additional services. of particular interest. For this reason, in recent days, the company has wrested a veteran of video games from Facebook, Mike Verdu who ran Oculus Studios, to begin to concretely explore the terrain.
In the letter to investors, the Los Gatos group in California finally indicated that it did not particularly fear growing competition, such as that of Disney +, and therefore did not look to acquisitions to strengthen. “We do not see any assets that we absolutely must have and have not found any major player with characteristics that would induce us to act.” “We are mostly competing with ourselves to improve our service as quickly as possible. If we can do that, we are confident that we can maintain our strong position and continue to grow as well as we have done over the past twenty years and beyond.” .
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