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Netflix gained 2.2 million paying subscribers in the third quarter of this year. That is a significant decrease compared to last year, although the first half of 2020 was quite successful. The company was already expecting declining growth due to the corona crisis.
Netflix reports in a explanation of the quarterly figures that it had counted on an addition of 2.5 million paying users, but that figure came out at 2.2 million. That is considerably less than the 6.8 million subscribers that were added in the third quarter of last year. Even when looking at 2020, a downward trend is visible: there were more in the first quarter 15.8 million paying subscribers at, which came to 10.1 million.
According to the company, the relatively low number of 2.2 million users in the third quarter can be partly explained by the good first half year; In its first nine months, Netflix gained 28.1 million paying customers, which the company describes as a record. That 28.1 million is more than the 27.8 million that were added in the whole of 2019. Partly because of this success in the first half of 2020, Netflix had already counted on lower numbers for the second half of this year.
During the explanation of the results of the second quarter, the company already mentioned the effects of the corona crisis as the cause of the decline in growth. However, according to Netflix, this crisis will not have major consequences for the amount of new content that will be put on the platform in the near future. When the pandemic started more than six months ago, Netflix still had a lot of content that had already been shot and was already in post-production, which meant that those titles could often be completed from a work-from-home situation. That is over now, but Netflix says it expects the number of original productions per quarter by 2021 to be higher than the numbers from 2020. The company says it is making good progress with the return of new content production, particularly in Europe. and Asia. Production of the fourth season of Stranger Things and the second season of The Witcher have also started. Netflix expects to finish filming 150 productions by the end of the year.
In the notes to the quarterly figures, Netflix also makes it clear that it is less and less dependent on the capital markets to raise money for its productions. For the remainder of this year, the company has no plans to take out loans. According to Netflix, there is 8.4 billion in cash on the balance sheet, which would reduce the need for external financing. The free flow of money is getting better and better, with which the company wants to indicate that it is increasingly capable of financing its own productions. Sales in the past third quarter were $ 6.44 billion, a growth of 22.7 percent from the same period a year earlier. Profit was $ 790 million, compared to $ 665 million in the third quarter of 2019.
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