Netflix is laying off 6% or roughly 900 of its global workers in the platform’s biggest round of redundancies to date.
The lay-offs impact product, tech, legal and HR teams and were announced to staff on Wednesday by co-CEOs Ted Sarandos and Greg Peters. Netflix is believed to employ around 17,000 staffers and the last time it made cuts was in 2022.
Hollywood has been mired in industry-wide lay-offs. Disney made several hundred staffers redundant last month, while David Ellison’s Skydance is expected to let go of many as part of a forecast $6bn in cuts.
Wall Street has been troubled by the decline of Netflix’s engagement metric in the first half of the year. The stock price has dropped by more than 20% year-to-date, and closed at $70.57 on Wednesday, compared to approximately $122 a year ago.
Investors were also concerned when the streamer walked away at the start of the year from its pursuit of the Warner Bros studios – whose parent company Warner Bros Discovery ended up at Ellison’s Skydance in the $111bn merger.
While Sarandos recently told a conference that the company was not growing as fast as he would like, in the memo from the co-CEOs obtained by Screen, the executives said Netflix remained on track to deliver its full year forecast.
Netflix reports Q3 earnings on October 20. The company did not have any comment when approached by Screen.
The co-CEOs’ memo appears below.
Team - We wanted to share that we are making a number of organizational changes and, as a result, we’ll be letting go of roughly 6% of our colleagues, with the greatest impact to our product, tech, legal, and HR teams.
Decisions like these are never easy, and we don’t take them lightly. Our top priority today is to support those who are leaving Netflix. The process will vary somewhat by country, but leaders will be connecting with impacted employees soon. If you are leaving, please know that we will support you throughout this transition and make sure you have as much clarity and context as possible. We also want to say thank you. What you’ve built, and the care you brought to Netflix, have made a lasting difference and we will always be grateful.
For the rest of the team, we know you have questions, too. Our mission - to entertain the world - is ambitious, and delivering on it requires us to be disciplined about where we prioritize our people and resources. Our business is strong and growing, and we remain on track to deliver our full year forecast. We’ll continue to invest aggressively in high impact areas to improve our service and further drive growth and innovation. Doing that means making focused choices across the business so we can keep delivering for our members, partners, employees, and investors.
We know changes like this are tough, but let’s stay focused. This is one of the most dynamic times in the history of entertainment - and it’s a moment perfectly suited to a company like ours that’s built at the intersection of technology and entertainment. Now it’s on us to step up and meet the moment, together, like we always do.
Ted and Greg
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