Netflix is attracting more users again thanks to series hits like “Squid Game”. In the third quarter, the number of subscribers worldwide rose by 4.4 million to just under 214 million. The streaming service thus clearly exceeded its own forecast of 3.5 million new customers and was also above the estimates of most experts. In the previous quarter, Netflix had disappointed expectations with 2.2 million new entries. The financial results were also impressive. Net profit rose in the three months to the end of September compared to the previous year by over 80 percent to 1.45 billion dollars (1.25 billion euros). Revenues grew 16 percent to $ 7.5 billion, as the company announced on Tuesday after the US market closed in Los Gatos, California.
After the pandemic paralyzed production and user growth in the previous quarters, Netflix is promising its strongest offering of films and series to date at the end of the year. The streaming company expects around 8.5 million new customers in the final quarter. Especially with the South Korean series “Squid Game”, which only started on September 17th, Netflix currently has a big trump card. Last week the company announced that the macabre and brutal survival drama had replaced the British series “Bridgerton” as the most successful Netflix production to date. Now Netflix announced that “Squid Game” had already been viewed from an “unbelievable” 142 million user accounts four weeks after its launch, making it “our biggest TV show ever”.
However, this statistic is only partially meaningful. Because with these public figures it is enough to see two minutes of a title to be counted. In the future, Netflix will instead indicate how many hours a series or film has been viewed in total. Netflix also registers internally how many accounts have watched a program to the end. These data are rarely made public. Given the success of series such as “Money Heist” and “Sex Education” and new seasons of other popular series such as “Witcher” and “Tiger King”, which are due to come out in the fourth quarter, Netflix could recover from the mixed course of the year so far. Because the growth in the first two quarters of 2021 had decreased sharply due to the lack of new film and series hits.
Despite the quarterly report beating Wall Street analysts’ predictions, investors parted ways with Netflix stocks. The papers lost 2.6 percent in value on the New York Stock Exchange on Wednesday. However, the price had also risen sharply recently, so that the opportunity for profit-taking is favorable.