Netflix business news: Subscriber growth at half mast. What impact on the SVOD service?

business news Netflix: Sustained subscriber growth. What impact on the SVOD service?

Netflix in numbers

To date, the platform has no less than 221.8 million subscribers and announces that it has collected 7.7 billion dollars in the last quarter of 2021, for a net profit of 607 million. Netflix also reports having registered 8.28 million new subscribers over the same period. The success of the Squid Game series is no stranger to this, since it alone was viewed by 142 million users just one month after its release, also setting the record for the largest number of subscribers having viewed the series (two thirds!). Video game enthusiasts have contributed to the success of the series The Witcher and Arcane, respectively inspired by the games The Witcher and League of Legends. If the figures announced by the streaming platform can make you dizzy and its roadmap for this new year shows many tempting projects, the fact remains that the competition is fierce, Netflix deplores an increase in the number of new subscribers which is slowing down, resulting in a drop in the group’s share on the stock market, which has even lost 20% of its value.

Again and again the fault of the health crisis?

While Netflix executives admit to having benefited from the availability of users during the 2020 and early 2021 lockdowns, they indicate that “retention and audiences remain strong but new subscriber growth has not returned to pre-pandemic levels”, while they specify that are responsible “various factors including the Covid which continues to weigh on the economy and macro-economic difficulties in different parts of the world, particularly Latin America”. Analyst Robert Enderle says:

There’s nothing wrong with Netflix, they’re just facing increasingly aggressive competition. It therefore becomes more difficult for them to stand out and attract the public.

At any rate, Netflix’s response to these results seems to be to increase its prices, which could also be caused by the increase in the platform’s content production costs. For the moment confined to the United States, this increase puts the basic rate at 9.99 dollars, while the highest rate reaches 19.99 dollars. It is very likely that this price increase will soon be applied to the rest of the world.

Source: 20 minutes