Coming into this earnings cycle there was much talk about how Netflix (NASDAQ: NFLX) was due to disappoint the street. At issue was to be their subscriber growth rate both in the U.S. as well as internationally. Last quarter Netflix missed on a number of metrics which caused the stock to lose over 15% when it opened the next day. Since then the street has been scrambling trying to reduce their expectations and lower forecasts.
After the close Monday, Netflix reported an earnings announcement that will once again leave the street scrambling to get a grip on the future of Netflix. The reason? Earnings absolutely blew past the street's expectations. At the core of this result was the subscriber numbers. They came in WAY better than expected, especially the international numbers. The company announced that they added 370,000 new subscribers in the U.S. (which more than beats the 300k the street projected), and a whopping 3.2 million internationally. 2 million was the streets expectation on those counts.
The interesting part about this is that they added this many new, overall subscribers despite an average of a 10% price increase in their service. According to their results, Netflix has now moved 75% of its base off their "grandfathered" rates into the higher fee plans.
Many believed that Netflix had reached a peak in the total number of subscribers in the U.S. Also a recent concern was the move to creating their own programming vs. licensing existing content. Because of the good returns from original content, the company also clarified in this earnings release hat they will up their "new programming" budget to a whopping $6 billion. This will make it one of the top spenders in the industry (ESPN is the only other network to spend more).
Despite the nice earnings release, analysts still are holding to their belief that Netflix faces a strong uphill battle. Analysts point to the high costs of creating original content in international markets, along with the lack of demand for this type of programming.
As for the stock price, shares of Netflix soared over 20% after hours, marking its largest move so far this year. If these levels hold, it puts the media giant into positive territory for 2016.