NetFlix (NFLX) Earnings: Consumer Spending Still Alive, Shares Jump

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Published
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Cammonopoly_wideweb__430x3250NetFlix (NFLX) benefited from two trends. The first is that consumers don’t have money. The other is that they need entertainment even when the world around them is awful.

Revenue for the fourth quarter was $359.6 million, a 19% increase over the same period last year.

Net income for the quarter was $22.7 million, or $0.38 per diluted share compared to net income of $15.7 million, or $0.23 per diluted share in Q4 last year.

The demand for the NetFlix service was impressive. Netflix ended the fourth quarter of 2008 with approximately 9,390,000 total subscribers,  26% year-over-year growth from the fourth quarter of 2007 and 8% sequential growth from the end of the third quarter of 2008.

NetFlix said it expected revenue of $387 million to $393 million in this quarter and $1.58 billion to $1.64 billion for the full year.

The market was impressed. The stock was up almost 7% after hours to $32.20. Before the rise from earnings, the shares were already up 40% over the last year.

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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