Netflix Falls On Lower Earnings, Sales Guidance

Netflix, Inc. NFLX shares dropped despite reporting a big first-quarter earnings beat.

The streaming service reported first-quarter earnings of 76 cents per share, beating estimates by 19 cents. Sales came in at $4.521 billion, beating estimates by $21 million.

The company issued weak guidance, seeing second-quarter sales of $4.928 billion against a $4.95-billion estimate. Netflix sees second-quarter earnings of 55 cents per share, which may not compare to the 99-cent estimate.

“We believe there is vast demand for watching great TV and movies and Netflix only satisfies a small portion of that demand. Last quarter, we talked about how our streaming hours in the US (our most mature market) on TV still only represents roughly 10% of total TV usage. We are much smaller and have even more room to grow in other countries and on other devices like mobile. For instance, Sandvine estimates our share of global downstream mobile internet traffic is about 2%,” Netflix CEO Reed Hastings wrote in his letter to shareholders.

Q1 Highlights

US Streaming

• Paid Memberships 60.23M
• Paid Net Adds 1.74M
• Sales $2.074B

International Streaming

• Paid Memberships 88.63M
• Paid Net Adds 7.86M
• Sales $2.367B

Netflix shares were down around $353.95 in after-hours trading. The stock closed 3 percent higher in the regular session at $359.46.

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