Netflix to spend €14 billion on content in 2021 as production ‘back up safely’

The production of Netflix content is “back up and producing safely in every major market, with the exception of Brazil and India”, and the company expects to spend $17 billion (€14.11 billion) on content in 2021, it said on Tuesday.

Making the prediction as part of its mixed financial reports for the first quarter of 2021, the company also identified that membership grew by 3.98 million in the first quarter of 2021, well below the company’s prediction of six million.

By the end of the quarter, Netflix’s year-on-year subscriber growth hit an astronomical 14 per cent, as membership to the streaming service rose to nearly 208 million.

However, the company’s investors will be concerned that the disappointing first quarter indicates the end of the pandemic boom for services such as Netflix’s, and shares in the company were down nearly eight per cent when US markets opened on Wednesday.

The company’s revenue remained strong in Q1, rising by 24.2 per cent year-on-year to $7.2 billion (€6 billion), up from the 21.5 per cent growth reported in Q4 2020.

Helped by this revenue growth, the company’s operating margin and operating profit hit record highs of about 27 per cent and $2 billion.

As the pandemic has forced people across the world to spend more time inside, Netflix has seen enormous growth, recording 37 million more subscribers in 2020 than 2019.

Additionally, in an effort to clamp down on term-and-conditions-breaching account sharing practices, the company has announced it is trialling a measure to combat this, forcing those sharing accounts to pay for their own.