Tag: Financials
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Netflix growth slows but 200m subscribers milestone is in sight

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Netflix warned investors that its subscriber growth was going to slow in the second half of this year, and it has. The video streaming service added 2.2 million net new paid subscribers in the third quarter, taking it to just under 195.2 million overall.

Netflix also said that it expects to pass 200 million subscribers (201.2 million to be specific) by the end of 2020.

The slowdown in growth was clear though: Netflix added 15.8 million subscribers in Q1 and 10.1 million in Q2. The 2.2 million in Q3 was below Netflix’s guidance of 2.5 million, which is one reason why its share price dipped following the announcement of its financial results yesterday.

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Vivendi reveals latest UMG financials and IPO plans for 2022

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With Warner Music Group and Big Hit Entertainment having gone public this year, Vivendi has confirmed that Universal Music Group is pressing ahead with its own plans for an IPO – but not this year or next.

“An IPO is planned for 2022,” announced Vivendi in its latest financials, adding that it’s also looking to “sell additional minority interests in UMG” following its deal with a Tencent-led consortium.

As for the financials, they revealed Universal bouncing back to growth in the third quarter of this year, bringing in €1.86bn (around $2.14bn) of revenue in Q3, up by 3.1% year-on-year (or 6.1% in organic terms).

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WMG set for $338m acquisitions (and possibly revenue decline)

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It was a busy day for Warner Music Group yesterday, with several interrelated announcements. First, there was news of the company raising $250m of new funding through a ‘senior secured notes offering’ to be spend to “fund a portion of the aggregate cash consideration for certain acquisitions”.

Later that day, a US regulatory filing offered more information on those plans. “In early October we completed an acquisition for certain music assets, and we recently came to an agreement in principle regarding a second acquisition regarding certain other music and music-related assets… for aggregate cash consideration of approximately $338 million,” explained WMG, noting that it has set aside $90m of cash on top of the $250m offering to pay for the deals.

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Epidemic Sound revenues grew in 2019; so did operating losses

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Swedish production music company Epidemic Sound saw its revenues grow by 66% to SEK 375.3m (around $42.1m) in 2019, but the company’s operating losses grew by 152% to SEK 206.7m ($23.2m) according to its financial results.

MBW has published the figures, which were released in Sweden earlier this summer. The financials offer a snapshot of the company’s business a few months before it made 79 of its 419 staff redundant in May.

“Covid-19 has just accelerated this transition into becoming a digital-first company, and supercharged it,” CEO Oscar Hoglund told us at the time.

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7digital says it’s on track for operational profitability

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Earlier this month, B2B digital music firm 7digital announced that it was raising £6m ($7.7m) from selling shares, to support its business. Now the company has added a further £1m, this time from a new revolving credit facility (loan) with Investec Bank.

7digital has also published interim financial results for the first half of 2020. Its revenues fell from £4.5m in the first half of 2019 to £3.1m this year, but 7digital pointed out that it has significantly cut its costs too, meaning that its operating loss shrunk from £3.2m in the first half of 2019 to £0.9m this year.

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NetEase Cloud Music saw ‘triple-digit revenue growth’ in Q2

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Chinese technology firm NetEase published its latest financial results last week, with no new figures for its NetEase Cloud Music streaming service. However, the service was mentioned in the subsequent earnings call with analysts.

“For NetEase Cloud Music, we continued to see triple-digit revenue growth in the second quarter year over year, with both membership and live streaming striking new highs,” said chief financial officer Charles Yang.

That revenue total wasn’t quantified, but NetEase Cloud Music sits within NetEase’s ‘innovative businesses and others’ category in its financials, which saw revenues grow by 39% year-on-year to RMB 3.7bn ($533.4m) last quarter.

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Beggars Group financials reveal £63.1m revenues for 2019

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Independent label Beggars Group has filed its latest annual financial results with Companies House in the UK. The company’s revenues fell from £74.2m in 2018 to £63.1m in 2019.

The report notes that the 2018 figure was skewed by Beggars’ revenues from the sale of Spotify shares after the streaming service went public. “Like for like we are pleased to note that the growth in sales is consistent across our key territories,” reported the label.

The financials offer some thoughts on the risks posed to Beggars Group (and by extension other labels in the UK) by the Covid-19 pandemic, and also the UK’s exit from the European Union.

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China’s Twitch equivalent DouYu has 165.3m monthly users

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We haven’t written about DouYu before, because the Chinese livestreaming video platform is focused on games rather than music.

The numbers are startling though: according to its latest financial results, DouYu averaged 165.3 million monthly active users in the second quarter of this year, including 58.4 million people on mobile devices.

Meanwhile, DouYu generated RMB 2.51bn ($354.4m) in revenues in Q2, up by 33.9% year-on-year. Of those revenues, only RMB 188.3m ($26.6m) came from advertising, while RMB 2.32bn ($327.8m) came from various ways that users/viewers pay.

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Tencent Music now has 47.1m paying online-music users

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Tencent Music published its latest financial results this morning, revealing that its number of ‘online music paying users’ grew by 51.9% year-on-year to 47.1 million people in Q2 2020.

The Chinese streaming giant’s revenues grew by 17.5% to RMB 6.93bn ($981m) while within that, online music subscription revenues grew by 64.7% to RMB 1.31bn ($186m). TME generated a net profit of RMB 939m ($133m) for the quarter.

Note, not every metric was positive: TME’s number of mobile monthly active users for online music fell from 652 million a year ago to 651 million now. However, that does mean a noticeably improved conversion rate: 7.2% of its active listeners now pay (through subscriptions and/or digital album purchases) compared to 4.8% a year ago.