Reed Hastings resigns as Netflix CEO amid a challenging outlook for the company

Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings just announced his resignation as one of the executive directors of the company. After a decade at the helm of the streaming platform, the businessman has decided to hand over his position to director of products, Greg Peters, who will lead the direction along with Ted Sarandos.

“Our board has been discussing succession planning for many years (even founders need to evolve!),” Hastings said in an official statement. “The board and I believe the time is right to complete my succession.” The businessman, however, will now occupy the position of executive president of Netflix.

Internal changes in the streaming company

According to Hastings, the movements in the management of Netflix are part of a succession plan that has been brewing for a long time. In addition, he assures that he trusts Peters’ abilities to lead the company, which has already had its “baptism by fire” with the challenges that affect the business and the pandemic.

Now in the role of chief executive, Hastings says he will be a bridge between the board of directors and the executive management of Peters and Sarandos, to which he will pay close attention and collaboration. In addition, the co-founder of the platform also points out that he will be “very focused” on making Netflix’s actions work well.

Hastings, which in 2016 created a fund of 100 million dollars to promote initiatives related to educationexplains that these changes will result in the possibility of dedicating a most of his time to philanthropy. After the announcement, according to Yahoo! Financeshares of the streaming giant rose about 6% after hours.

Now, Peters and Sarandos face a challenging outlook. The competition in the industry, with major players like Disney+, HBO Max, Paramount+, Amazon Prime Video, among others, is colossal. Netflix is ​​no longer the king of streaming that it used to be and is in the process of improving its offerings to win over as many subscribers as possible.

In the first quarter of last year, for the first time in a decade, Netflix lost users, specifically 200,000. In the second quarter, things did not improve and the drop reached 970,000 users. However, the company rolled out a number of changes, including a cheap plan with ads, and before closing the year it grew againadding 7.66 million subscribers in the last quarter.

Images: Netflix

In Xataka: Netflix cancels series non-stop, but there’s a strange logic behind it. And it has nothing to do with audiences