Netflix Inc on Tuesday said it laid off about 2 percent of its staff in a belt-tightening move after growth slowed at the once-booming streaming television service.
“These changes are primarily driven by business needs rather than individual performance, which makes them especially tough, as none of us want to say goodbye to such great colleagues,” a company spokesperson said.
About 150 employees have been laid off, most of them in the US, the spokesperson said, adding that Netflix also cut spending on contractors.
Photo: Chris Delmas, AFP
The move came just weeks after Netflix reported that it lost subscribers for the first time in more than a decade.
Netflix ended the first quarter with 221.6 million subscribers, slightly less than the final quarter of last year. The company blamed the quarter-on-quarter erosion to suspension of its service in Russia.
Chief financial officer Spence Neumann told an earnings call last month that Netflix would be “pulling back” on spending over the next two years.
The firm reported a net income of US$1.6 billion in the first quarter, down from US$1.7 billion in the same period a year earlier.
Netflix believes that factors hampering its growth include subscribers sharing accounts with people not living in their homes.
The streaming giant estimated that while it has nearly 222 million households paying for its service, accounts are shared with more than 100 million other households not paying subscription fees.
Netflix is testing ways to make money from people sharing accounts, such as by introducing a feature that lets subscribers pay slightly more to add other households.
The firm is looking at adding a lower-priced subscription tier subsidized by advertising, a model long snubbed by CEO Reed Hastings.
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