Netflix lays off 'around 150 employees' amid slowing growth and subscriber losses
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- Netflix is laying off "around 150" people, mostly in the United States, the company said on Tuesday.
- The reason for the layoffs, Netflix said, is "slowing revenue growth."
- In April, Netflix reported that it lost subscribers for the first time in over a decade.
Netflix laid off "around 150" people on Tuesday, the company said in a statement.
The layoffs, which impact "mostly US-based" staff, are due to "slowing revenue growth," the statement from Netflix said. "These changes are primarily driven by business needs rather than individual performance," the statement said," which makes them especially tough."
It's unclear which departments were impacted, but Deadline reported the layoffs impacted at least some employees in "executive ranks, including in original content." The company has about 11,000 employees in total.
Earlier this year, Netflix revealed that it had lost subscribers to its video streaming service in the previous quarter, its first subscriber loss in over a decade.
Moreover, company leadership warned at the time of further subscriber losses in the months to come. Executives blamed "revenue growth headwinds" in a report to shareholders, and cited false expectations set by high Netflix use during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Netflix was an early success story during the first months of the pandemic, as millions of people stuck indoors marathoned Netflix shows like "Tiger King."
"COVID clouded the picture by significantly increasing our growth in 2020," the letter in April said, "leading us to believe that most of our slowing growth in 2021 was due to the COVID pull forward."
In the years since, new competition from the likes of Disney Plus and HBO Max have increasingly drawn away viewers from a streaming market once dominated by Netflix.
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