They’re not struggling to keep the lights on. They’re making a calculated bet they can extract more profit this way.
That's a 75% plummet, which is definitely approaching the equivalent of struggling-to-keep-the-lights-on for a modern corporation. That's three quarters of the way to bankruptcy, big red flashing danger lights.
So of course this is a calculated bet to improve profitability. Virtually everything a for-profit corporation does is to improve profitability -- that's the whole point of being a business in the first place. What else would you expect?
If the market thinks the company won't be able to make a lot of profit, or the market thinks the company is approaching insolvency, the share price will tank.
In other words, falling share price is not a cause of insolvency, it can be an indicator for it. The share price quite literally is the market value of the company.
Of course it does. If a stock goes to $0, the company is essentially insolvent. Sure there are details of timing -- insolvency isn't exactly the same as bankruptcy isn't exactly the same as a stock price of $0 -- but in practice they all tend to go together and the company as a going concern owned by present investors is effed.
Splitting hairs over these technicalities is important for lawyers and analysts and management and in bankruptcy court, but not terribly important in the larger view. In the larger view, market cap via share price is a very practical reflection of the overall health/viability of a publicly traded company.
But it’s also not splitting hairs. It’s important to realize that equity price has no bearing on the company itself. You’re talking about something different than what was being discussed. You’re saying share price is correlated to expectation of company performance. What was being discussed was company performance is related to share price. One direction is true but the other isn’t. Companies see their valuations fall for all sorts of reasons that are not reflected in actual performance. Thats often because of a hype cycle that deflates, or maybe a scandal involving an executive, or whatever. This fall in valuation doesn’t impair the company in the least, except for if they need to raise capital by issuing equity.
May companies get delisted, which effectively brings their share price to the penny stock levels. They sometimes resurface and relist. Companies also can do certain corporate actions that make their stock basically worthless. The key is that while a stocks price sometimes corresponds to actual performance, actual performance is never impacted by stock price.
See how picking arbitrary dates different from yours makes it look like a completely different story?
Sure, but "not meeting expected subscriber numbers" doesn't mean "the company is soon going to be unable to keep the lights on" or even "the company has an unsustainable business model and will fail". It just means market analysts believed Netflix would grow at a particular rate, but they grew at a lower rate. Wall Street is pretty fickle about growth numbers.
Also note that the stock price has partially recovered, to $355. A year of fairly steady stock price increase doesn't suggest to me that there's anything particularly wrong with the company.
Up higher, you said that a 75% price drop is "three quarters of the way to bankruptcy", which is... just not how the stock market works. The stock price is just a reflection of how the public market values ownership in the company. Hell, the stock price of a company going through bankruptcy proceedings might not even drop all the way to zero, depending on the details of the bankruptcy (e.g., if the company's assets exceed liabilities, there'd still be money left over for shareholders even in a liquidation). And regardless, bankruptcy doesn't even mean the company is going to be shut down; plenty of companies come out of chapter 11 and remain going concerns.
I'd speculate that those expected subscriber numbers may have been inflated by the covid pandemic.
So while Covid might have been part of it, it's nowhere near the full story.
Counterpoint: Gamestop.
Counterpoint: Bitcoin.
Counterpoint: AMC.
Counterpoint: literally any of its other fellow meme stonks
Is it though? Were they funding operations by selling shares?
(Side note, recaptcha is getting genuinely awful. 3 different challenges, 1 of which had 3 steps, and 20 seconds to get past it?! Have they given up detecting bots and decided to just make them wait?!)
Your analysis makes no sense. Please learn more about finances before commenting on financial matters.
And if you look at the quarter before -- 2022Q4 -- they made just $55 million net income, which on revenue of 7.85B is below 1% profit.
The overall point is that Netflix is in an extremely volatile and risky industry where it's not in a position to leisurely "extract" more profit because it's a bad guy or something, but rather it's very much been forced into doing things like cracking down on password sharing and introducing an ad-supporter tier simply to stay healthy as a business. Fortunately both of those things seem to be going well, but they easily might not have.
If a company's market cap drops 75% in a short period of time, it's making big changes out of necessity, not as a comfortable choice.
You picked the one quarter they did poorly, before this they made a consistent 1B+ net profit. This is extremely good financials, and not volatile at all. They also have 50B in assets at the moment, including almost 8B in cash.
— Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises
>That's a 75% plummet, which is definitely approaching the equivalent of struggling-to-keep-the-lights-on for a modern corporation. That's three quarters of the way to bankruptcy, big red flashing danger lights.