American media services provider Netflix Inc. continued to add subscribers during the second quarter of coronavirus crisis and now has 193 million paid subscribers worldwide.
This giant company added another 10 million paid global subscribers in April, May and June, nearly four times the number of adds during the same time frame a year ago and a record for Q2.
The uptick follows the addition of nearly 16 million members in Q1, beating the company’s previous record of 9.6 million set during the same quarter a year ago by more than 64%, as stay-at-home orders increased demand for entertainment-at-home.
Netflix in its first quarter had forecast to add 7.5 million paid subscriptions in Q2, bringing its total to more than 190 million, citing “the uncertainty on home confinement timing.”
Bizwomen says, Netflix also announced with its Q2 earnings that Ted Sarandos has been promoted to co-CEO alongside Reed Hastings and elected to the board of directors. He will also continue to serve as chief content officer.
Meanwhile, the Los Gatos, California-based company’s financials were mixed: The streamer posted diluted earnings of $1.59 on revenues of $6.1 billion – up 25% from the same quarter a year ago.
“Due to the pause in production from the pandemic combined with higher-than-forecast paid net adds year-to-date, we now expect free cash flow for the full year 2020 to be break even to positive, compared with our prior expectation for (negative $1 billion) or better,” the company said in the shareholder letter, adding that it expects free cash flow to “dip back to being negative again” in 2021.
Also, the company added that June subscriptions were dinged by the cancellations of a “small percentage of members who had not used the service recently.”
