Netflix, Inc. (NASDAQ:NFLX) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Spencer Neumann: Well, what you’ve seen is and what we talked about when our revenue had slowed down in early ’22 is that we would keep our content — our cash content spend roughly flat. And that’s what we’ve been doing from 2022 through with the plan through ’24 with the lumpiness that we talked about, some of it because of that kind of coming out of the throws of COVID, as we talked about in the last couple of calls and now most recently because of the strikes. But our hope and our expectation is we get back up to those levels similar to levels in ’24 as we were in ’22. So we will grow next year is our hope and expectation back to those levels. And we talked about it in the letter too, what that works out to is roughly about 1.1 ratio in terms of our cash content spend relative to our content expense.

So that allows us to kind of scale in a healthy way while also kind of growing our cash flow over time. And then as we prove out revenue acceleration, which we expect to do and as we’ve guided to, to start in Q3 and then further in Q4. We hope to start ticking up our cash spend on content again and doing it in a healthy way. We just — we have to prove that out, obviously. But we’ve got a lot of great entertainment that we hope to provide to members all around the world is as Ted said. So we think we’ve got a lot more we can spend into, spend into a big opportunity, but we want to do it responsibly.

Jessica Reif Ehrlich: But would your content spend very measured, let’s put it that way and you’re kind of maybe investing in ad tech capabilities. But beyond that, like it feels like there’s tremendous leverage in your business model. So is there a way I like to think about growth and free cash flow beyond ’24?

Ted Sarandos: So I would say, Jessica, the best way to think about it is we expect to grow revenue and profits over time. As Spence mentioned, we are past the most cash intensive phase. So that cash — content cash spend to content amortization ratio that we’ve talked a lot about in the past, we think is going to be roughly in the neighborhood of 1.1 times in 2024 and probably somewhere around that area for the foreseeable future based on the current plans. So I think that gives you a the right sort of building blocks and be able to get a rough sense of it. I think what you would see is that would lead to very healthy free cash flow generation for the foreseeable future.

Jessica Reif Ehrlich: So can we talk about uses of free cash flow and maybe possibly M&A. I mean there are a lot of distressed assets in media land, maybe you give the lowest multiples in memory that we’ve seen. What assets might be interesting to you?

Ted Sarandos: Spence, do you want to go on.

Spencer Neumann: Yeah. We just said we’ve got — we’ve always looked at these things in terms of the opportunity for IP versus those assets, some of those assets are stressed for a reason. And so we’re mostly looking at when we look at our M&A activity would be mostly around IP that we can develop into great content for our members, which is our real strength in business. So that’s — I would think we have traditionally been very strong builders over buyers, and that really hasn’t fundamentally changed. But if there are opportunities that give us access to pools of IP that we could develop into and against that could be super interesting.

Jessica Reif Ehrlich: And just maybe moving to sort of a little bit away on that, but you’ve developed a library over 10 plus years at this point. And it’s pretty substantial, and you’ve got some amazing — I mean, really amazing global titles. Would you consider selling your library content to others?