Netflix just crushed Q1 and the stock tanked about 10%. In big tech, a beat that misses the forecast is still a miss.
Add a co-founder walking off the board on the same day. Investors did the math and hit sell.
Revenue was real. It jumped 16% from a year ago to $12.25B, just above Wall Street's $12.17B target.
The profit number is where your portfolio needs to squint. Netflix earned $1.23 per share - EPS, or profit per share of stock. But most of that came from a $2.8B check Warner Bros. Discovery paid Netflix to drop out of a bidding war for their assets.
Without the check, the quarter was just okay. Think home run padded by a very generous gust of wind.
Management also held the full-year revenue outlook at $50.7B to $51.7B. No bump, no raise, even after a quarter that technically beat.
Netflix told investors Q2 revenue would hit $12.57B and EPS would land at 78 cents. Wall Street wanted $12.64B and 84 cents.
Small gap on paper. Huge problem when a stock is priced for near-perfect growth.
Then there is the leadership shift. Reed Hastings - co-founder, stepped down as CEO in 2023, board chair since - won't run for reelection in June.
Greg Peters and Ted Sarandos keep running the company. Daily operations don't change. But Hastings walking out the door on a soft-numbers day is the kind of bad timing the market notices.
The stock fell about 10% Friday to close at $97.31 - the biggest one-day drop in six months for $NFLX.
From here, Netflix has to beat its own Q2 guide. And it has to do it without a Warner Bros. windfall propping up the bottom line.
Subscriber growth, ad-tier traction, and content spending tell the next chapter. The breakup check was a one-time sugar rush, and the market just remembered that.
