Netflix hasn't done much wrong, despite a 35% plunge on quarterly results this past week, and a 22% one back in January. The company has convinced 222 million customers worldwide to hand it an average of nearly $12 apiece each month -- no small feat.
It did that by creating a peerless streaming experience, reinventing how movies and shows are enjoyed, and, OK, burning through $9 billion over the past seven years to give customers more Hollywood pizazz than they were paying for.
That last part sounds like a bad thing, but if investors are rewarding you with an endlessly climbing stock price and cut-rate debt, you give them what they want: rapid subscriber growth. During the pandemic, tens of millions joined Netflix (ticker: NFLX) even as price increases took hold. Studio production froze for a while, lowering costs. Free cash flow turned solidly positive, until the company committed itself to billions more in content spending.
Meanwhile, we got way ahead of ourselves on the stock, at one moment in November bidding it up to $700. By "we" I mean not me, because I didn't buy the stock, but really, me a little, because I contribute to an index fund that mindlessly scoops it up at any price. Anyhow, that was a nutty price, briefly valuing the company at $318 billion. At the time, 2024 free cash flow was pegged at $5.6 billion -- a highly theoretical number that was based on the belief that scale would overtake spending, allowing Netflix to turn on the profitability.
But then Netflix's subscriber growth slowed to a trickle during the fourth quarter, and this past week we learned that it turned slightly negative in the first quarter. It's still positive if we adjust for turning off service to Russia, but not by nearly enough to justify the stock price. Anyway, Netflix predicts greater subscriber losses during the second quarter. Shares fell to $216.
The key here for the tempted is to not get Ackman-ed. Hedge fund investor Bill Ackman spent more than $1 billion on Netflix after the January plunge at what he called an "attractive valuation." Then he sold this past week at a $400 million loss, writing to shareholders that growth has gotten "extremely difficult to predict." He also wrote that he wouldn't be surprised if Netflix ended up being an excellent investment from here -- hedgies are going to hedge.
Netflix has a plan to return to growth. It estimates that there are 100 million viewers free-riding off shared passwords. If you're logging on to BoJackHorseman1980's guest profile to avoid putting up $10 a month for a basic account, I'm guessing you're a price-sensitive consumer, and those are worth good money to advertisers. So, Netflix plans to add a lower-priced tier with commercials.
That's a sensible plan, says Tim Nollen at Macquarie Research, who pulled a reverse-Ackman by presciently downgrading Netflix to Underperform from Neutral after its January report. Discovery+, for one, has shown that cheap streaming plans with ads can bring in higher average revenue per user than pricier plans without ads. But Netflix says the shift will take up to two years. Maybe it's just setting beatable expectations, but creating an ad business is also a lot of work, says Nollen. "You don't just hire a salesperson and start doing it," he says. "There's a lot more infrastructure and technological capability and data management and all sorts of things that you have to do."
That $5.6 billion forecast in November for Netflix's 2024 free cash flow has now been trimmed to $3.5 billion, and it remains theoretical, but plenty feasible, in light of the company's current revenue base of around $30 billion a year. Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD), the recent spinoff from AT&T $(T)$ that includes HBO Max, is expected to generate $3.8 billion in free cash this year on $12.6 billion in revenue. Nollen says to buy that one, but he's staying bearish on Netflix for now. "If I had a good sense that the inflection was coming," he says, "that would probably get me more interested in the stock."
Walt Disney is crushing it financially at its U.S. theme parks. And its streaming services are growing nicely. But its stock is the worst-performing member of the Dow Jones Industrial Average over the past year, losing 33%.
One reason is that Netflix's struggles have investors tempering their long-term expectations for streaming in general. Another is that Disney is spending richly on content, which has turned it for now into a thinly profitable growth company, and such companies tend to get marked down as interest rates rise.
There's also a Florida showdown. This past week, lawmakers there passed a measure to eliminate Disney World's longstanding right to effectively provide its own municipal services and oversight, which opens more questions on logistics and costs than it answers.
Disney, siding with upset workers, had run afoul of Florida's Republican lawmakers and governor by speaking out against a new law that restricts "instruction" on matters of sexual preference and gender identity to "age-appropriate" discussions in older grades. It also halted political contributions, which in Florida had gone mostly to Republicans.
Critics say the new law is vaguely worded and pretends to fix a problem that doesn't exist in order to sow political division. Fans say it combats "woke" overreach and gives parents more control over schooling.
J.P. Morgan says that stock gains from here could require "some relief of recent political headlines." BofA Securities says that a sum-of-the-parts analysis implies that Disney's streaming business is valued at a scant one times revenue.
I say...what do I say? That I'm a few more words away from a two-week vacation. If I had to choose between the falling knife of Netflix and what is suddenly the political hot potato of Disney, I'd grab the potato. But I'd be more inclined to keep my hands in my pockets until things cool off.