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Netflix added millions more subscribers in the fourth quarter than Wall Street expected, helping to send shares of the streamer up after the bell despite a big earnings miss.
The company also disclosed that co-CEO Reed Hastings would be stepping down from his position and transitioning to the post of executive chairman. Greg Peters, the company’s chief operating officer has been promoted to co-CEO alongside the already established Ted Sarandos.
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Here are the results:
EPS: 12 cents vs 45 cents per share, according to Refinitiv.
Revenue: $7.85 billion $7.85 billion, according to Refinitiv survey.
Global paid net subscribers: 7.66 million adds, compared to 4.57 million subscribers expected, according to StreetAccount estimates.
Netflix’s EPS missed largely due to a loss related to euro-denominated debt, but its margins of 7% still topped Wall Street’s expectations. The depreciation of the U.S. dollar compared to the euro during the fourth quarter isn’t an operational loss.
This is the first quarter that Netflix’s new ad-supported service is included in its earnings results. The company launched this cheaper tier in November, but has not disclosed what portion of the new subscriptions are from users who have opted for this service.
During the company’s prerecorded earnings call, Netflix said that it has seen comparable engagement from its new ad tier members as it has seen with its regular consumers. Additionally, it noted that it has not seen a significant number of people switching plans. So, those who subscribe to its premium and more expensive offerings are rarely bumping down to the cheaper ad-supported model.
“We wouldn’t be getting into this business if it couldn’t be a meaningful portion of our business,” said Spencer Neumann, the company’s chief financial officer, during the call. “We’re over $30 billion in revenue, almost $32 billion in revenue, in 2022 and we wouldn’t get into a business like this if we didn’t believe it could be bigger than at least 10% of our revenue.”
Last quarter, the streamer said it was “very optimistic” about its new advertising business. Going forward, Netflix will no longer give subscriber guidance, although it will still report those numbers in future earnings reports. The rationale is that the company is growing its focus on revenue as its primary top line metric instead of membership growth.
“2022 was a tough year, with a bumpy start but a brighter finish,” the company said in a statement. “We believe we have a clear path to reaccelerate our revenue growth: continuing to improve all aspects of Netflix, launching paid sharing and building our ads offering. As always, our north stars remain pleasing our members and building even greater profitability over time.”
Netflix touted new releases like the television series “Wednesday,” the docuseries “Harry and Meghan” as well as Rian Johnson’s film “Glass Onion” as popular content during the quarter.
The company predicts that revenue growth in the first quarter 2023 will rise 4%, higher than the 3.7% Wall Street is currently projecting. Netflix says this growth will be driven by more paid memberships and more money per paid membership.
Additionally, the first quarter will mark Netflix’s preliminary roll out of its paid sharing program, which aims to make money from users who previously shared passwords with people outside their own homes.
The company said it expects some users who were borrowing accounts to stop watching programming on the platform, because they are not added as extra members to existing accounts or do not convert to paid members.
“However, we believe the pattern will be similar to what we’ve seen in Latin America, with engagement growing over time as we continue to deliver a great slate of programming and borrowers sign-up for their own accounts,” the company said.
For a third time since taking office in January, President Donald Trumpplans toextend a deadline that would require China’s ByteDance to divest TikTok’s U.S. business.
“President Trump will sign an additional Executive Order this week to keep TikTok up and running,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement. “As he has said many times, President Trump does not want TikTok to go dark. This extension will last 90 days, which the Administration will spend working to ensure this deal is closed so that the American people can continue to use TikTok with the assurance that their data is safe and secure.”
ByteDance was nearing the deadline of June 19, to sell TikTok’s U.S. operations in order to satisfy a national security law that the Supreme Court upheld just a few days before Trump’s second presidential inauguration. Under the law, app store operators like Apple and Google and internet service providers would be penalized for supporting TikTok.
ByteDance originally faced a Jan. 19 deadline to comply with the national security law, but Trump signed an executive order when he first took office that pushed the deadline to April 5. Trump extended the deadline for the second time a day before that April mark.
Trump told NBC News in May that he would extend the TikTok deadline again if no deal was reached, and he reiterated his plans on Thursday.
Prior to Trump signing the first executive order, TikTok briefly went offline in the U.S. for a day, only to return after the president’s announcement. Apple and Google also removed TikTok from the Apple App Store and Google Play during TikTok’s initial U.S. shut down, but then reinstated the app to their respective app stores in February.
Multiple parties including Oracle, AppLovin, and Billionaire Frank McCourt’s Project Liberty consortium have expressed interest in buying TikTok’s U.S. operations. It’s unclear whether the Chinese government would approve a deal.
— CNBC’s Kevin Breuninger contributed to this report
Amazon Web Services is set to announce an update to its Graviton4 chip that includes 600 gigabytes per second of network bandwidth, what the company calls the highest offering in the public cloud.
Ali Saidi, a distinguished engineer at AWS, likened the speed to a machine reading 100 music CDs a second.
Graviton4, a central processing unit, or CPU, is one of many chip products that come from Amazon’s Annapurna Labs in Austin, Texas. The chip is a win for the company’s custom strategy and putting it up against traditional semiconductor players like Intel and AMD.
At AWS’s re:Invent 2024 conference last December, the company announced Project Rainier – an AI supercomputer built for startup Anthropic. AWS has put $8 billion into backing Anthropic.
AWS Senior Director for Customer and Project Engineering Gadi Hutt said Amazon is looking to reduce AI training costs and provide an alternative to Nvidia’s expensive graphics processing units, or GPUs.
Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4 AI model is trained on Trainium2 GPUs, according to AWS, and Project Rainier is powered by over half a million of the chips – an order that would have traditionally gone to Nvidia.
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Hutt said that while Nvidia’s Blackwell is a higher-performing chip than Trainium2, the AWS chip offers better cost performance.
“Trainium3 is coming up this year, and it’s doubling the performance of Trainium2, and it’s going to save energy by an additional 50%,” he said.
The demand for these chips is already outpacing supply, according to Rami Sinno, director of engineering at AWS’ Annapurna Labs.
“Our supply is very, very large, but every single service that we build has a customer attached to it,” he said.
With Graviton4’s upgrade on the horizon and Project Rainier’s Trainium chips, Amazon is demonstrating its broader ambition to control the entire AI infrastructure stack, from networking to training to inference.
And as more major AI models like Claude 4 prove they can train successfully on non-Nvidia hardware, the question isn’t whether AWS can compete with the chip giant — it’s how much market share it can take.
The release schedule for the Graviton4 update will be provided by the end of June, according to an AWS spokesperson.
The U.S. banking giant told CNBC on Tuesday that it’s planning to launch a so-called deposit token on Coinbase’s public blockchain Base, which is built on top of the Ethereum network. Each deposit token is meant to serve as a digital representation of a commercial bank deposit.
JPMD will offer clients round-the-clock settlement as well as the ability to pay interest to holders. It is a so-called “permissioned token,” meaning it is only available to JPMorgan’s institutional clients — unlike many stablecoins, which are publicly available.
“We see institutions using JPMD for onchain digital asset settlement solutions as well as for making cross-border business-to-business transactions,” Naveen Mallela, global co-head of Kinexys, J.P. Morgan’s blockchain unit, told CNBC Tuesday.
“Given the fact that deposit tokens would eventually be interest bearing as well, this would provide better fungibility with existing deposit products that institutions currently use,” he added.
Deposit token vs. stablecoin
JPMorgan said the benefit of launching a deposit token over a stablecoin is that it gives institutional clients a way to move money around faster and easier while still having a close connection with traditional banking systems.
A stablecoin is a type of digital token that’s designed to be pegged 1:1 to the value of a fiat currency at all times. The most popular stablecoins are Tether’s USDT and Circle’s USDC. The entire stablecoin market is worth approximately $262 billion, according to data from CoinGecko.
In the U.S., stablecoins remain broadly unregulated — although this is likely to change soon. The Senate is set to vote Tuesday on the GENIUS Act, legislation that would introduce formal regulation for such tokens.
Elsewhere, the European Union regulates stablecoins under its Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation, or MiCA, while the U.K. has also laid out plans to regulate the crypto industry. Britain’s Financial Conduct Authority is currently consulting on proposals to require stablecoin issuers to ensure their tokens maintain their value against a given asset.
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JPMorgan’s digital asset chief told CNBC that the bank chose Coinbase as its blockchain partner since the crypto exchange is already a long-standing client and a leader in the crypto space.
JPMD has had “preliminary interest from large institutional players who want more native onchain cash solutions from pre-eminent and reputed financial institutions,” Mallela added.
Speculation had been building around JPMorgan’s new crypto offering after a trademark application filed by the bank for “JPMD” was made public Monday.
The trademark outlined a broad range of crypto services under the JPMD name, including trading, exchange, transfer and payment services for digital assets.
Various crypto media outlets had speculated whether the bank was about to launch its own stablecoin. However, JPMorgan says that, while its token may share some similarities with a stablecoin, it’s ultimately a different kind of product.