Netflix, Inc. (NASDAQ:NFLX) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Netflix, Inc. (NASDAQ:NFLX) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript October 18, 2023

Netflix, Inc. beats earnings expectations. Reported EPS is $3.73, expectations were $3.46.

Operator: Good afternoon, and welcome to the Netflix Q3 2023 Earnings Interview. I’m Spencer Wang, VP of Finance, IR and Corporate Development. Joining me today are Co-CEOs, Ted Sarandos; and Greg Peters; and CFO, Spence Neumann. Our interviewer this quarter is Jessica Reif Ehrlich from Bank of America. As a reminder, we will be making forward-looking statements and actual results may vary. Jessica, let me turn it over to you now for your first question.

Q – Jessica Reif Ehrlich: Thank you. So let’s start with you, Ted. Now that one strike is over, the Writers Guild, what are the implications for your business?

Theodore Sarandos: Thanks, Jessica. Let me first say, we want nothing more than to resolve this and get everyone back to work. That’s true for Netflix. That’s true for every member of the [NPTP]. It’s why our member CEOs have prioritized these negotiations above everything else we are doing. We spent hours and hours with SAG-AFTRA over the last few weeks, and we were actually very optimistic that we are making progress. But then at the very end of our last session together, the Guild presented this new demand that kind of on top of everything for a per subscriber levy unrelated to viewing or success, and this really broke our momentum, unfortunately. But you should know, we are incredibly and totally committed to ending this strike.

The industry, our communities and the economy are all hurting. So we need to get a deal done that respects all sides as soon as we possibly can. In terms of the impact, these are the times that I’m glad we have such a rich and deep and broad programming selection. Programming costs themselves rise nearly every year, primarily driven by competition. Competition for talent, competition for shows and films. And you can see we’ve managed successfully through that year on year on year. And the same is true for – during COVID when we were able to manage the slate through a prolonged and pretty unpredictable production interruptions. But I really think we are not really that focused right there on it and how this impacts much, except for our biggest opportunity, which is to continue improving the quality of the slate.

We focused on that day-in, day-out, year-in, year-out. And I’m incredibly pleased with Bela and the team and the progress that they are making. So if you’ll indulge me for just a second, I just would draw your attention to the Q4 slate as an example of that, headlined by the return of The Crown for its final season. This is one of the most ambitious television shows in the history of television. We have a new season of Big Mouth, history – a new season of [Elite], the launch of Berlin, which is a spin-off from our La Casa de Papel, our Money Heist franchise, and new limited series like All the Light We Cannot See from Shawn Levy. That’s Incredible and Bodies from the UK. And that’s just on the TV side. And on the film side, one of our strongest quarters ever.

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Q&A Session

We have this enormous Sci-Fi Spectacular from Zack Snyder, Rebel Moon, a new film from David Fincher, The Killer and these films that just lit up the fall film festivals recently, like May, December from Todd Haynes and Bradley Cooper’s Maestro, The Dock Feature, American Symphony. That’s all coming in Q4. And for family viewing too, we’ve got a new animated feature from Adam Sandler, [indiscernible] Leo, that’s hysterical, Chicken Run 2, which is a sequel to the most successful stop-motion animation film ever, and a new series from the CoComelon World called CoComelon Lane, Family Switch from Director McG, sorry, it’s Jennifer Garner and Ed Helms. So it’s an incredible slate, something new and exciting for all taste, all moods, all ages, and we’re just super proud of the team that they’ve been able to manage through this and still deliver so much joy for our members.

Jessica Reif Ehrlich: One more on strike-related like just the aftermath, you discussed at a recent conference, giving talent more transparency. Could you talk about what that looks like? What are the new metrics talent will be paid on? And is it even standardized across the industry?

Theodore Sarandos: Yes. Look, what I talked about there was heading towards a world that we’re streaming data will be much more readily available. Remember, streaming itself is not that exotic anymore. We’ve been doing it for 15 years. So we – at the beginning, we thought there was a hard kind of apples and oranges comparison to ratings and streaming. And I think we’ve gotten to a place where it’s mostly about engagement and that does capture the value of watching and that things will become much more transparent the way TV has always had ratings and music has always had billboard and the theatrical has always had box office. So it will be much more common for the data to be fully transparent. What I didn’t mention though is that part of that – of our reason for not publishing early was part of our promise with creators.

At the time we started creating original program, our creators felt like they were pretty trapped in this kind of overnight ratings world and weekend box office world defining their success and failures. And as we all know, show might have enormous success down the road and it wasn’t captured in that opening box office. So part of this was the relationship with talent, not just the business aspects of it. And I do think that over time, people are much more interested in this. We’re on the continuum today of how much data do we publish. I think we’ve been leading the charge, starting everyone down the path of a top 10, publishing our top 10 list and our annual wrap-up list and everything that give a lot of transparency to the viewing. And I just expect it will be more and more transparent.

Jessica Reif Ehrlich: Great. Let’s move on to page sharing. Have you identified most of the borrowers and can you provide any help in, in how much more is left to go and the challenge in completing the crackdown?

Gregory Peters: Sure. I’ll take that one. And I’ll start by saying we’re just incredibly pleased with how it’s been going. And you can see the progress from our membership growth in Q2. Now in Q3, you can see it embedded in the revenue outlook for Q4. I think paid sharing represents the kind of difficult challenge where we needed to balance both important relevant consumer considerations with the importance of ensuring that our business got reasonably paid when we deliver entertainment. And it’s an example where we leveraged core executional capabilities that we’ve been building for over a decade, sort of how you develop good product experiences, how do you solve hard problems through them? How do you have an iterative model where you listen to consumers to tell us what’s working and what’s not?

So we’ve been excited about that. But because it’s such a challenging problem, we’re shifting essentially consumers’ expectations and what they expect from us. We’ve always thought that making this change should be done in a steady, considered way. And so our plan has been to stage out this rollout. We’ve been delivering our product experience to different borrower cohorts according to that plan. And as a result, I think as you’re alluding to, there are a number of borrower cohorts, which has, as of today, have not received part of that experience. And just to explain that a bit. I mean, part of the motivation to stage it out is based on technical considerations. So this is our ability to build features and improve model accuracy over time in a way that allows us to ensure that we’re accurately developing and applying our interventions and as effective and as positive a way for consumers as possible.

Part of that has been just to stage things out based on borrower behavior. So we want to show up with the right product experience at the right moment. That’s more likely to convert a borrower over rather than have them spin-off. So we want to think about that from maximizing long-term revenue. So we’re going to continue the rollout for the next couple of quarters. I think folks are trying to figure out how much juice is left there. And I would say we anticipate that we will have incremental acquisition, incremental adds for the next several quarters. We’ve seen that in the last couple of quarters. I think also worth noting that, that was on top of also very healthy organic, meaning not driven by paid sharing growth. So we anticipate seeing that for the next several quarters to come.

And then just stepping back, there’s a set of borrowers that we’re not going to convert. We haven’t converted yet. We’re not going to convert over the next couple of quarters. But that really represents how we think about paid sharing going forward, which is it’s now become part of just our standard way of operating. And we have many hundreds of millions of qualified households out there. There are Smart TV households that we want to win over the next several years. And those borrowers we’re not going to convert in the next couple of quarters represent that same group. So we got to go after them the same way we’re going after people who have never signed up for Netflix, which is having an incredible content offering and incredible value and get them so excited that they just have to sign up.

Jessica Reif Ehrlich: Right. Moving on to the recent advertising restructuring. Can you talk about why you made the management change and what you would like to accomplish?

Gregory Peters: Yes. First, I’d say Jeremy has done a great job getting us essentially from zero to where we are today. She laid the foundation for the ads business. She’s hired and built a burgeoning team of leaders who in turn now are hiring the teams and people who are going to take the business forward. But it’s an important time and I think a great time for Amy to come in and extend that great work to build on that foundation and drive our ads business to the next level. And why am I so specifically excited about Amy in the role. First of all, she’s a high Netflix tenure employee. She’s been with the company for over seven years. She’s demonstrated really positive impact and great results in several different roles, but most recently as part of the studio and leading a big global team that is scaling very, very, very quickly, which sounds familiar when you think about where we want to take our ads business.