The streaming wars have been in the news a lot lately. Netflix has been the king of the streaming world for many years. Other competitors like Amazon and Hulu were never a serious threat to the dominance of Netflix in the United States and abroad. However, the introduction of Disney’s new streaming service has changed things. It has made Netflix focus more on other countries to make up for the subscribers that they might be losing in the United States. It is still not known how big of an impact that Disney+ is having on Netflix at this point.
Netflix has always been very secretive about many aspects of their business. For example, they will only reveal the number of viewers that certain shows and movies get when it serves their promotional purposes. In other words, they will only release viewer data when the numbers are very high. The streaming giant has never publicly disclosed any info regarding how many subscribers they have in specific foreign countries. However, all of that changed recently after a securities filing in the United States. According to Mashable, Netflix has a little more than 158 million subscribers around the world. It is still the most popular streaming service on the planet by far.
Netflix wants big investors to understand that the company is growing at a very massive rate outside of the United States. They felt that it was necessary to emphasize this point because of all the focus on their competition inside the United States that could hinder the growth of the streaming giant. Indeed, the growth of Netflix in foreign countries is very impressive. For example, the number of Netflix subscribers in areas like Africa, the Middle East and Europe has doubled over the past two years. Obviously, the growth of Netflix on a global scale could be slowed once Disney+ becomes available in many of these foreign markets.
The reason why Netflix wants to impress Wall Street with its foreign growth is very obvious to most people. For many years, the value of the Netflix stock has been directly linked to their subscriber growth in the United States. Now Netflix wants the financial world to see that they are dominating in their industry around the world. The streaming platform is hoping that these very promising foreign subscriber numbers will cause the value of their stock to go up. Only time will tell if that is the case.
