Netflix, in the wake of a couple of rough quarters, hundreds of layoffs, and intensifying competition from the likes of HBO Max, Hulu, and others, is downsizing its office holdings both in the Bay Area and in SoCal.
Some blaring headlines this week have declared that Netflix is abandoning “its Los Gatos campus” and “an entire Los Gatos campus,” and while neither is technically wrong they are both misleading.
Netflix is, in fact, subleasing some of its Los Gatos office space on Winchester Circle, with one building being the company’s original headquarters from back in the day. This represents 165,000 square feet of office space the company says it no longer needs, with some teams housed there, like its product team, largely working remotely these days or from other locations.
As the Real Deal explains, this does not affect Netflix’s primary, four-building, 485,000-square-foot campus a half-mile away on Albright Way in Los Gatos, which it has occupied since 2015.
In addition to letting the Winchester Circle properties go, Netflix is also subleasing 180,000 square feet that it has leased in Burbank.
An anonymous company rep told KRON4 this week that the company “regularly evaluates its real estate portfolio to ensure it is optimizing spaces,” which is a standard company line about these sorts of decisions.
Netflix laid off 300 employees in June, following the layoffs of 150 others the month prior. We know the layoffs impacted the company’s six-month-old in-house fan publication Tudum, whose editorial team was largely decimated after a December launch of the online mag. It’s not clear what other departments were affected.
Those layoffs came after a dismal April earnings call in which the company copped to seeing a drop in global subscribers, impacted in part by the company pulling out of the Russian market in the wake of the Ukraine war beginning in February.
Last month we learned that Netflix is partnering with Microsoft to create a new, cheaper ad-based subscription tier — something that company execs had long insisted they would never do. And company co-CEO Reed Hastings said in April that the company was also working on cracking down on password-sharing, which will involve the creation of a new sharable (but more expensive) “family” tier option as well.
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