Netflix expects to publish in the vicinity of $ 18 billion in cash in 2025 – and it sees a lot of runway to expand in the coming years, according to Netflix CFO Spencer Neumann.
“We are nowhere close to a ceiling” with regard to contents of contents, said Neumann, who spoke on Wednesday at the Morgan Stanley Tech, Media & Telecom Conference from 2025. As a global entertainment company, he said: “I think we have just started.” The expenditure for cash content of $ 18 billion for this year would have risen by around 11% of $ 16.2 billion in 2024.
Asked about how Netflix predicts the editions for content, Neumann said: “It’s a bit of art and a little science.” It starts with expected income, which the company has “pretty good predictability,” he said, and then Netflix looks at the editions of content in the context of achieving margin goals.
Netflix finished 2024 with 301.6 million paid members worldwide, as a result of which growth accelerates growth from 2023. That translates into more than 700 million people looking at Netflix content, Neumann said. “However, we are still small in every important measure” within the wider entertainment company. Netflix is in about 40% of the connected TV households around the world and has conquered 6% of its addressable market, said the CFO. And in the US and other countries, Netflix still represents less than 10% of the total TV.
“We see the chance to grow everywhere,” said Neumann. “It is more about, where is the greatest chance of growing and spending … We want to stay in the growth mode versus maintenance mode for as long as possible.”
The goal of Netflix is to “deliver more and more entertainment value per dollar,” he said. It is also aimed at continuing to improve the overall experience “because the competition also improves,” said Neumann.
Netflix programs to a wide and diverse worldwide audience, with a slate with TV shows and films in multiple genres and formats, produced in more than 50 countries. Neumann noted that in 2025 Netflix has three of the largest script bars series ever the “most mature” content category returning: “Squid Game”, “Wednesday” and “Stranger Things”. Neumann said that Netflix’s licensed contents of contents are also growing and that live events are a growth category that “we are just starting to expand.”
Chief Content Officer Bela Bajaria has created a global studio operation, Neumann said. The most important thing for productions outside the US is that they ‘have to start with large, local impact’ with ‘authentic stories’. Then, “If those stories are great, they can occasionally travel” outside those markets, as the Korean drama “Squid Game” did.
YouTube has taken a larger share than Netflix of watching on TVs. But Neumann said that while the two players are competing for the consumer’s attention, the “not a zero-butest game”. He said that Netflix is most focused on taking the share in entertainment time that “none of us records” – that is, traditional TV. Moreover, Netflix differs from YouTube because “we share with our makers in the creative and economic risk … We think we are home to the best makers and storytellers on the planet.”
As for how big Netflix’s appetite is for live sports, Neumann said that the company wants to stay in “those big, event moments”, such as the pair of NFL games on Christmas Day and WWE Wrestling, who started streaming in the US Weekly this year in the US Weekly. “We loved the NFL on Christmas Day, Beyoncé Bowl, it worked,” he said. Whether Netflix would be interested in, for example, the acquisition of an NFL Sunday afternoon game package, Neumann replied: “Never say never about these things”, but that it is “not on our nearby horizon”.
For the fourth quarter of 2024, Netflix reported 18.9 million net new global subscribers, approximately double analyst expectations. For the entire year, Netflix has added more than 41 million subscribers, considerably an increase of 29.5 million in 2023.
Netflix also increased its prospects for 2025 for turnover between $ 43.5 billion and $ 44.5 billion (an increase of $ 500 million from earlier guidelines), which would be 11.5% -14% compared to last year. It focuses on an operational margin of 29% for 2025, one percentage point of the earlier prediction.
In the meantime, in January 2025, Netflix announced price increases in the US and other markets in all plans – a flex from the subscription streamer who demonstrates the price force. The standard advertising -free plan in the US rose by $ 2.50, from $ 15.49 to $ 17.99 per month, the first time in three years since Netflix increased the price of that layer. Netflix implemented the first increase for the advertising low, which is now $ 7.99 per month in the US, an increase of $ 1 from $ 6.99.
Netflix customers worldwide flowed more than 94 billion hours in content in the second half of 2024, according to the company 5% year after year. Season 2 “Squid Game” was the most viewed series of Netflix during that period with nearly 87 million views. But no title was good for more than 1% of the total display on Netflix: for example “Squid Game 2” represented only 0.7% of the time spent viewing in the back of the year.