Netflix's chief financial officer David Wells will step down after eight years on the job.
Wells, 47, will help choose a successor and stay on until his replacement takes over to make sure the transition goes smoothly, Netflix said in a statement on Monday. Wells said he's leaving to focus on philanthropy.
Wells guided Netflix’s finances as the company defied sceptics’ expectations of how much money it could spend on programming without going broke, pumping billions of dollars into new TV shows and movies. Netflix has budgeted more than $8 billion this year to buy shows from rival companies and finance productions of its own.
The growing output helped Netflix boost its subscribers past 130 million globally and upend the TV business. Yet Netflix’s spending has also raised concerns about the company’s financial health. Though profitable, Netflix still spends more money than it makes each year, and has had to sell bonds to finance its programming.
Netflix was still a DVD-by-mail service when Wells joined the company in 2004. Investors largely took the shake-up in their stride, with shares trading down less than 1 per cent as of 12.25pm in New York. The stock had surged 80 per cent this year through Friday’s close.
Wells won't be leaving money on the table when he departs. His unexercised stock options were worth about $50 million as of Friday's close, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
– Bloomberg
