Good afternoon, and welcome to the Netflix Q1 2022 earnings interview. I'm Spencer Wang, VP of IR and corporate development. Joining me today are co-CEO, Reed ...
And I think everyone is knowing that that's going to come up, and we'll come out on the other side of it. And we're doing this both from sort of assembling it organically, as well as through acquisition, which is a key part of our strategy to be able to build the capacity to produce the games titles that we think are really going to unlock value for our members. And our -- we will continue to grow the content spend relative to prior years. A new movie from Omar Sy, "The Takedown," from France; a great film from Germany, "All Quiet on the Western Front;" and a great slate of new content from Japan, Cube, "First Love," that we're really excited about the output from all of our international territories as well. And the -- we've always said we ran through the COVID delays that had us back-stack 2021. Yeah. So those -- they are proven brands for us, of course, and going into the -- I'll start with "Stranger Things" because the new season of "Stranger Things" is a super-sized season that's why we cut it in half. But I would also say it's -- we're also working hard to ensure that we have a range of price points across a set of plans with different features that deliver on different consumer needs and consumer desires, while making sure and be very focused that we retain good accessibility to the service for a broad group of people in every country we serve at sort of that entry level. OK. I want to go to pricing just from -- I mean there's a lot of -- you kind of have this confluence of trends basically that are taking place here. So that's really what we saw in Q2 -- I'm sorry, in Q1. And that's really what's reflected in Q2, which is sort of the continued trends we're seeing in acquisition and this -- it's a -- that slightly elevated churn to probably continue through the quarter. It shouldn't be any more complicated than that, Doug. Honestly, we've got to compete and we've got to make -- continue to improve on the core service, which -- right, which is making TV series and films and now, games that people really love. We also saw probably some -- a little bit more macro strain in some countries, some parts of the world, like Latin America, we mentioned that on the last call, but that was elevated, and just a little bit more seasonality in the business. And as we put in the letter, COVID created a lot of noise on how to read the situation, boosted us a lot in 2020.
I'm Spencer Wang, VP of IR and Corporate Development. Joining me today are Co-CEO, Reed Hastings; Co-CEO and Chief Content Officer, Ted Sarandos; COO and Chief ...
Okay. I wanted to — just back to content for a minute. Our teams are on the ground, our creative executives, our business executives, are on the ground all over the world, are much more empowered, they are much more collaborative, and they’re much more risk-tolerant than their counterparts all over the world, which enables — it creates an ecosystem for something like Squid Game or for like a Lupin or La Casa de Papel to exist. And the bet is that those folks will enjoy those titles and that they will talk enthusiastically about those titles to their friends, their family, their coworkers, and that will lead to another positive momentum on the flywheel of sign-ups. And so we’re really — being able to split the season when you can deliver both halves of it in a really high-quality way, like in the case of Ozark, had additional episodes, so both experiences were really satisfying for the binger or the one-at-a-time viewer as well. But, Greg, I was just hoping you could talk a little bit more about the recent price increases primarily in the U.S. I know it’s still early in the U.K., but I guess to what effect — you did mention slightly elevated churn in 1Q. How much was that a factor? And so just to set your expectations, my belief is that we’re going to go through a year or so of iterating and then deploying all of that so that we get that solution globally launched, including markets like the United States. And obviously, we’re doing that so that we can invest then into more great content and a better service for everyone. We’re not trying to shut down that sharing, but we’re going to ask you to pay a bit more to be able to share with her so that she gets the benefit and the value of the service, but we also get the revenue associated with that viewing. We suspect some of that is those macro factors we mentioned and maybe a little bit of competition on the margin as well. It sounds like acquisition might be at the top of the list and you’ve talked about that for a little while now, but hoping you could isolate some of those factors and then talk to us about how that informs your 2Q guide for a loss of 2 million subscribers. So that’s one of the things that we’ve put a finer point on this letter, but I just want to reinforce that the core addressable market is still there and that’s what we’re still growing into, Doug. And what we got to do is take it up a notch, and I’ll tell you that we’re all pretty — I know it’s disappointing for investors, and it is for sure, but internally, we’re really geared up, and this is like our moment to shine.
Netflix, Inc. (NASDAQ:NASDAQ:NFLX) Q1 2022 Earnings Conference Call April 19, 2022, 18:00 ET Company Participants Spencer Wang - VP, Finance, ...