Netflix reports record international subscriber growth

While Netflix said in October that it expected to add 1.65 million new subscribers domestically, it ended up falling short with 1.56 million.

From January through March, the company expects to add about 4.35 million global subscribers.

Shares of NFLX surged by more than 9% after tonight’s earnings report, climbing as high as $117.50 after closing the regular trading day up 3.7%.

Netflix said it expects US subscribers to jump 1.75 million this quarter.

Netflix now has more than 75 million paying customers around the globe, a record figure largely driven by global growth.

Unfortunately for CEO Reed Hastings, despite making a big splash at the Consumer Electonics Show earlier this month by announcing the launch of Netflix in more than 130 additional countries, bringing the total to more than 190, subscriber numbers for those 130-plus countries won’t be available until next quarter. But the news was not as good as in the same quarter the previous year (Q4 2014), when it posted an EPS of $0.72 on revenue of $1.49 billion.

Analysts on average had expected a profit of 2 cents per share and revenue of US$1.83 billion, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S.

Netflix said involuntary service cancellations tied to the company’s inability to process payments from subscribers whose credit and debit cards were changed to chip-based technology “continues to be a background issue”, as it described in October.

On the worldwide front, the company has said it will remain unprofitable this year and then shift to profitability, and projects it will be about breakeven on earnings this year. The service is now in every major market on its overseas agenda with the notable exception of China, where Netflix still must find a suitable partner and satisfy the concerns of government regulators who block the country’s population from watching some content. In a letter to shareholders released Tuesday, company executives noted that two-year period will expire this spring.

Long-time Netflix subscribers will soon have to pick their poison – pay a higher monthly rate, get lower-quality streams, or cut off service entirely.

Now here’s the bad news: Netflix missed its own U.S. subscriber growth estimates for the second quarter in a row.

If he is, he certainly didn’t show it during Netflix’s fourth-quarter earnings interview on Tuesday.

To help make up for its heavy spending on content, which is expected to total $5 billion this year, Netflix recently raised the price of its popular streaming subscription plan by a dollar to $9.99 a month for new subscribers in the United States, Canada, and Latin America.