Netflix's co-CEO Ted Sarandos gave some intriguing backstory on why the streamer isn't available in China, and how the industry gets "overlooked" during trade deals.
Sarandos was being interviewed during Semafor's World Economy Summit on Wednesday when he was asked about the company not being available in the world's second-largest economy.
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"Fifteen years ago, everyone thought [a presence in China] was existential," Sarandos said. "I put in a couple of years of trying to do it."
Those efforts, Sarandos said, went nowhere.
"We actually had to deal with a company to license our content … and one part of the deal was the content had to clear the [China's government] censorship board to make it to the air," he recalled. "And in three years that a single episode of a single Netflix show cleared the censorship — not one. [The government] had no interest in us being in China."
So what happened next, Sarandos said, "I watched everybody spend the next decade grinding out all of their time to get [into China], and ultimately ended up in the same place I did — which is nowhere. We're one of the rare companies in the U.S. has no exposure to China. I mean, no exposure to China's censorship, taxes, tariffs, anything. There's a big business in the rest of the world that is happy to host Netflix."
Speaking of tariffs, Sarandos was also asked about the timely subject of trade deals, and whether Hollywood tends to gets "a bad rap" as an industry despite generating hundreds of billions in global sales each year.
"I don't know about a bad rap, but it's overlooked as an industry," Sarandos said. "Netflix alone — I think from about from 2020 through 2024 — contributed $125 billion to the U.S. economy and created 140,000 jobs … But I do think it gets overlooked as an industry. We're kind of getting of thrown under the bus in trade deals occasionally. People forget that this is a real business. You hardly ever see a sitting president get photographed on a studio lot."
Fresh off a blockbuster earnings report on April 17 — which beat Wall Street expectations on revenue, sending analysts' stock price targets higher — the co-chief has a busy schedule. After the Semafor event in D.C., Sarandos is expected at the Time100 Summit later today in New York City.
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