Netflix shareholders have filed a complaint against the streaming platform which they accuse of having deceived them about the decline in the number of subscribers to the service, a news which has caused the price of the title to drop.
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The Californian group made “false and/or misleading” statements and withheld certain information, according to a press release published on Tuesday.
Investors criticize him in particular for not having said that “the growth of subscriber acquisitions was slowing, due, among other things, to the sharing of accounts between several customers and increased competition from other streaming services”.
Netflix announced on April 19 that it had lost 200,000 subscribers worldwide in the first quarter compared to the end of 2021, a first in more than 10 years.
The share price fell “more than 35%, to end at 226.19 dollars on April 20”, note the lawyers in charge of the class action.
The streaming giant, which expects to lose even more subscribers in the spring, has planned to tighten the screw on the side of the sharing of identifiers and passwords, which allow many people not to pay for access. to the platform.
It had already announced in March that it was conducting tests in Chile, Costa Rica and Peru to charge its customers for adding additional accounts to their profile.
But in its forecast for the first quarter, Netflix had expected to gain 2.5 million additional subscribers – and analysts expected even more – hence the shock of the loss.
It was partly caused by the suspension of service in Russia after the invasion of Ukraine, which resulted in a net loss of 700,000 subscribers. “Without this impact, we would have had 500,000 additional subscriptions” compared to the last quarter, Netflix specified on April 19.
In all, the platform has 221.64 million subscriptions.
She regularly mentions during the quarterly results the competition from other services, but also that of indirect competitors, applications like TikTok to video games.