Reed and Ted’s Very Scary Road Ahead
Reed and Ted’s Very Scary Road Ahead
ESG on the gaping hole in the streamer's new strategies
After the disaster that was Netflix’s end of 2021 earnings report in January, some analysts warned us not to freak out so much. One bad quarter does not a dead Netflix make. To which I would have said, “Yeah, fair point.”
Then Netflix had two bad quarters in a row.
The quarter that just ended might not be “bad” so much as terrible. (Say it like Charles Barkley…turrible.) Global subs actually went negative, and even if you ignore the Russian subscriber losses, Netflix would still *only* have grown by 500k, one of Netflix’s smallest growth quarters in years. Revenue growth dipped below 10 percent and they don’t expect this to improve next quarter, as they forecast a loss of subscribers of 2 million people. Yeah, terrible.
Reed “Keeper Test” Hastings, who has been used to playing the conquering hero at these events, instead sounded like a stranger in a strange land, stumbling through the explanations with an anxious how did I get here tone.
After the last quarter, I provided The Ankler readership with my thoughts on how Netflix could shift strategy. Unlike last quarter, even Netflix has gotten the memo: something’s gotta change. And they know that things need to change now. They spent the first two pages of their earnings report explaining what went wrong and partially how they plan to fix it.
Taking their earnings report and post-earnings conference call, they have