넷플릭스(Netflix)가 구독자 감소로 인해 전 분기 대비 주가가 10% 이상 하락한 것으로 밝혀졌다.
테크크런치(TechCrunch)는 넷플릭스의 회사 가치가 컴캐스트(Comcast)를 뛰어 넘을 것으로 예측했던 월스트리트(Wall Street) 기대와는 달리, 독자층의 감소로 전 분기 대비 시가 총액만 $10 billion(약 11조 원) 감소해다고 전했다. 이는 2분기 대비 기대 실적에 한참 못 미치는 수준이다.
넷플릭스는 지난 몇 년 간 최고 수준의 기업 가치를 창출해왔다. 특히 컴캐스트와 제휴를 맺음으로써, 일각에서는 최소 10년간 미디어 업계를 선도할 것으로 주목해온 바 있다.
하지만 기대치 보다 높은 성장 가능성이 꼭 좋은 영향만을 미쳤던 것은 아니다. 넷플릭스는 이미 신규 가입자를 확보하면서 생긴 상당한 부채를 앉고 있었고, 이 때문에 현재만큼의 가치가 미래에도 동일할 것인가에 대한 의견이 엇갈렸기 때문이다.
현재 넷플릭스의 사업 자체는 원활한 편이나 앞으로 신규 구독자 확보를 위해 어떤 방안을 제시할 것인지는 두고봐야 할 상황이다.
Netflix didn’t add as many subscribers as expected by a bunch of people on Wall Street who, on a quarterly basis, govern whether or not it’ll be more valuable than Comcast — and that is probably a bad thing, as it’s one of the primary indicators of its future potential for said finance folk.
While it’s still adding subscribers (a lot of them), it fell below the forecasts it set for itself during the second quarter. That’s shaved off more than $10 billion in its market capitalization this afternoon. This comes amid a spending spree by the company, which is looking to create a ton of original content in order to attract a wider audience and lock them into that Netflix ecosystem. That could include shows like GLOW, Jessica Jones, 3% or even feature films. But it’s still a tricky situation because it needs to be able to convert shows from that kind of crazy spend schedule into actual subscribers.
CEOs and executives will normally say they’re focused on delivering long-term value to shareholders, or some variation of that wording, but Netflix is a company that’s been on an absolute tear over the course of the past year. It’s more than doubled in value, overtaking said previously mentioned cable company and signaling that it, too, could be a media consumption empire that will take a decade to unseat like its predecessor. (Though, to be sure, Comcast is going to bundle in Netflix, so this whole situation is kind of weird.)
Of course, all of this is certainly not great for the company. The obvious case is that Netflix has to attract a good amount of talent, and that means offering generous compensation packages — which can include a lot of stock as part of it. But Netflix is also a company that looks to raise a lot of debt to fund the aforementioned spending spree in order to pick up additional subscribers. That’s going to require some assurance that it’ll be a pretty valuable company in the future (and still around, of course), so it may make those negotiations a little more difficult.
Everything else was pretty much in-line, but in the end, it’s that subscriber number that didn’t go as well as planned.
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