How Long Can Netflix Maintain It’s Current Growth?

Another quarter ends, another earnings begins, and with it comes the tell-tale swooning and tutting over Netflix (NASDAQ: NFLX), and there was plenty of both at its earnings call last night. 

So how did the king of streaming do in Q3? 

Netflix is far from done!

With all the talk of diversification into merchandise, gaming, and more from Netflix in recent months, one could be forgiven for believing that it was running out of ideas for content. 

Then along came ‘Squid Game’, and the world sat up on their couches once more and watched. And not just that, but a whole host of other content appears to be knocking it out of the park of late, including ‘You’ and ‘Lupin’, while there’s plenty to get excited about in Q4 — I’m, of course, talking about ‘The Witcher’ season two.  

But what about the numbers? 

• Earnings per share (EPS): $3.19 v.s. $2.56 expected
• Revenue: $7.48 billion v.s. $7.48 billion expected 
• Net subscriber additions: 4.4 million v.s. 3.84 million expected

Pretty spectacular-looking stuff if you compare it to what feels like several quarterly misses of late. And what’s more, despite co-CEO Reed Hastings remarking that the company was in “uncharted territory”, Netflix seems pretty optimistic about Q4. 

So optimistic, in fact, that it’s anticipating 8.5 million net subscriber additions during the current quarter, which would be its most successful period since Q2 2020.

There remains the proverbial elephant on the screen though in the fact that North American growth continues to decline — only 70,000 additions last quarter — meaning that costly international expansion will continue. However, given that four out of 10 of the company’s most-watched shows are so-called foreign language productions, this appears to be paying off. 

Let’s hope it delivers in Q4 too.