Netflix Q3 Slightly Chilled

Your favourite streaming giant Netflix, released its quarterly earnings with subscriber numbers growing, but showing signs of cooling down (as expected) after enjoying the massive lockdown surge in earlier parts of the year. The other noteworthy announcement from the company was that Ted Sarandos, Netflix's content boss has been promoted to co-CEO, a natural progression for him.

Netflix blew past all of our expectations (ok, maybe not Paul's) in the first two quarters of 2020 as people were forced to stay home and find ways to entertain themselves. In the first nine months of 2020, Netflix added 28.1 million subscribers, which is more than the 27.8 million added for all of 2019.

Yesterday, they reported revenues of $6.44 billion, up 23%, with global net subscriber additions north of 2.2 million thanks to the Asia-Pacific region which was responsible for almost half of these new subscriptions.

The movie "Cuties" upset a lot of people in the US, I wonder if North American numbers were affected by this at all? There have been new content production delays due to the global shutdown, but things are starting to normalise. Netflix announced that some of its titles like "Stranger Things" and "The Witcher" are back in production mode baby!

Management said that we should expect more original content during each quarter of 2021 than we saw this year having invested over $18 billion in new shows. Shares of Netflix were down over five percent in late trade, but they are still up 60% this year. These pullbacks are a buying opportunity - we still like Netflix as a long-term investment in a growing industry.​ They now have 195 million subscribers, not yet at Paul's target of 1 billion, but getting there.