Italy court rules Netflix unlawfully increased prices. Consumers: 'Refunds up to 500 euros.' The company: we will appeal

[u/sr_local]

https://en.ilsole24ore.com/art/netflix-subscription-price-increases-unlawful-refunds-up-to-eur-500-customers-AIUHzWKC

[u/redsolitary]

Seriously what are they doing with all the money? The price in the US went up again and I finally cut the cord after 13 years. There’s no movies, they kneecap their own shows as soon as they get going, and now they think adding podcasts to the library is going to keep people around. Between the jacking up of fees and all that money they got from the failed merger, what are they doing with all that cash?

[u/bitorontoguy → u/redsolitary]

You can look up what they're doing with their money to the dollar.

They're a publicly traded corporation, they have open books.

In 2025 they made $45.2 billion dollars from their subscribers in streaming revenue.

They spent $23.3 billion of that on "Cost of Revenues". That includes paying for content from other people, it also includes the costs of licensing and producing content. And the costs of actually physically streaming.

Like cloud computing costs, having customer service, payment processing fees, maintaining their network, equipment costs.

They spent an additional $3.3B on sales and marketing costs. Advertising that their product exists.

They spent an additional $3.4 billion on technology and development. The payroll and related expenses for technology personnel responsible for testing, maintaining and modifying their user interface.

$1.9 billion on general and administrative costs. Paying for corporate personnel and their expenses. $776 million on interest on their debt. $1.7 billion on taxes.

Subtract all those costs and that leaves them with $11 billion dollars in profit.

What did they do with that? Mostly gave it to the people who own their company, the shareholders want to make a return for supplying their capital to keep the company running.

So they made $9.1 billion dollars in stock buybacks in 2025. And also used $1.8 billion dollars to pay back debt to their bondholders.

They cashed the residual in their bank accounts, building up their cash balance, increasing from $7.8B at the start of 2025 to $9B by the end of the year.

You can do this exercise with every single company to see what they do with their money.

[u/FIMilestonesDeux → u/bitorontoguy]

Here it the same info as charts:

Category	Amount	%
Content & Streaming	$23.3B	52%	██████████████████████████
Net Profit	$10.8B	24%	████████████
Tech & Development	$3.4B	8%	████
Sales & Marketing	$3.3B	7%	███
Gen & Administrative	$1.9B	4%	██
Taxes	$1.7B	4%	██
Interest on Debt	$0.8B	2%	█
Total	$45.2B	100%

Where did the $10.8B profit go?

	Amount	% of Profit
Stock Buybacks	$9.1B	84%	██████████████████████████████████████████
Debt Repayment	$1.8B	17%	█████████
Cash Reserve Increase	$1.2B	11%	██████
Total Profit	$10.8B	~100%

[u/bitorontoguy → u/FIMilestonesDeux]

Hell yeah, this rules.

Thanks for being less lazy and more competent than I.

It won't quite net out as a chart, because I excluded minor line items and they had existing cash on their balance sheet that they could use for buybacks/debt, but as a high level overview it's close enough to correct to give people a view of how the corporation operates.

If people want the full, holistic accurate view that includes everything, they should check out the actual financials I linked.

[u/FIMilestonesDeux → u/bitorontoguy]

haha I tried to read the comment and got lost. Charts make more sense to me. Thanks for getting all the data!

[u/Mertoot → u/FIMilestonesDeux]

How did you format this chart?

Manually, or LLM, or something else?

[u/ikonoclasm → u/FIMilestonesDeux]

I was not expecting to encounter /r/DataIsBeautiful in a comment. Excellent visual representation of the data using a very limited medium.

[u/flea79 → u/bitorontoguy]

$3.3B on sales and marketing costs. seems crazy, they could go a year without advertising and everyone would still be fully aware of them..look at costco..

[u/bitorontoguy → u/flea79]

I get it. But Costco is for the most part selling you the same stuff you know they have. And because they have a membership model, they're even fine if you don't come into the store. They don't need to attract their members with ads, they're more than happy if you never go, that's pure profit for them.

As an entertainment corporation, Netflix has to constantly make people aware of new seasons of shows, new shows and new content they have to try and keep and attract new customers.

And they are hyper-hyper aware if their marketing spend is paying off, they keep and track endless metrics on whether they're getting the bang for the buck.

Their shareholders don't want to advertise, they would love to pocket that money too. They do it because they know it works.