Netflix Gets Ruined On Weak Earnings, Shares Plunge 14%

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Published
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Shares of Netflix (NASDAQ: NFLX) fell 14% after hours on top of a drop of a drop of 4% during regular trading hours. The stock reached $88 compared to a 52-week high of $304.79 as the video rental company reported another set of disappointing numbers.

Netflix reported

Netflix added nearly 3 million streaming members in Q1, bringing our total to over 26 million global streaming members, and strengthening our position as the world’s leading Internet TV network. We anticipate returning to global profitability in Q2, and plan to launch our next international market in Q4. We are constantly improving our service with better personalization, better user-interfaces, better streaming, and more content. As a result, per-member viewing hours set new records in Q1 and are on track to do so again in Q2, on a year-over-year basis. We launched our service in the UK and Ireland in January and are very pleased that, after the first 90 days, we had substantially more members than we had after the first 90 days of Canada or Latin America.

Net revenue rose from $719 million to $870 million. The company had a net loss of $5 million compared to a profit of $60 million in the same period a year ago. Netflix may still be growing, but the rate has slowed. The cost of adding and retaining clients and paying licensing fees of new content has risen substantially. Wall St. worries that Netflix is in a bidding war with telecom and cable providers and other firms with VOD package which now include Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) and Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN)

The earnings were better than the company expected,  but investors no longer see Netflix as one of the great business success of the last few years.

Douglas A. McIntyre

Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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