Netflix Co-CEO Outlines Growth Strategy Beyond Streaming

Netflix Co-CEO Ted Sarandos on Wednesday (April 23) laid out the streaming giant’s vision for growth, which includes plans to diversify beyond online streaming as well as continuing to grow in its core business.

At the Semafor World Economy Summit 2025, Sarandos was asked how Netflix plans to achieve its goal of becoming a trillion-dollar company, which seems hard to reach unless they expand beyond streaming.

Sarandos first doubled down on opportunities in its core business.

He said Netflix captures only about 5% of consumer spending and 10% of total TV watching time in its most mature markets. As such, there is “enormous room to grow just in the things that we do,” Sarandos said.

In the previous five years, Netflix has doubled its revenue, increased profits tenfold and tripled its market capitalization, according to Sarandos. “So there is a path to (a trillion-dollar market cap), obviously, but it all is incredibly dependent on executing well,” Sarandos said.

Nevertheless, Netflix is also exploring additional revenue streams by creating non-streaming experiences of their most popular shows.

Creating Experiences

This week, Netflix debuted “Stranger Things: The First Shadow” on Broadway, which is based on the hit show “Stranger Things.” Sarandos describes the play as “part Broadway show, part thrill ride” that tells the origin story of its popular series.

The “Stranger Things” franchise has also spawned consumer products, including “Surfer Boy Pizza,” which Sarandos claimed is “the number one frozen pizza brand in Walmart.”

Netflix has already seen success with events like the “Squid Game Experience” in Times Square and “Bridgerton Ball” dances, where fans arrive in costume to relive their own Regency era fantasies. Sarandos said there had been at least seven marriage proposals at these balls.

“There’s a very unique relationship with IP and storytelling and people who express who they are through the shows that they love,” Sarandos noted.

Coming this year is “Netflix House,” with locations planned for Philadelphia and Dallas. These venues will feature dining, experiential retail and ticketed experiences that rotate around various Netflix content.

Sarandos characterized these as “the next generation of what a theme park might be” — similar to Topgolf-type experiences that people might visit four or five times a year rather than once every five years.

Read more: Netflix Says Demand ‘Stable’ Amid Recession Fears

Localization and Personalization

While many companies are moving toward more globalization, Sarandos said Netflix is unique in that it’s both a global and local entity: It streams to a global audience and yet its offerings showcase local culture.

“Our Korean team feels very much like it’s a Korean company,” he said. “They’re able to make great programming for Korea because there’s no focus on making it global.”

This strategy has led to runaway hits like “Squid Game,” which became a global phenomenon despite being created specifically for Korean audiences.

Sarandos said Netflix learned a counterintuitive lesson from this experience: “The more authentically local it is, the more likely it is to travel,” or do well across cultures.

Sarandos said the company initially made content aimed at a global audience, mixing actors from different countries with different native languages. This approach failed, he said.

While Netflix is in many countries, one glaring absence is China.

Sarandos said that despite years of effort and a partnership with a Chinese video streaming company called iQiyi, “in three years, not a single episode of a single Netflix show cleared the censorship” requirements.

He then realized that “they had no interest in us being in China.”

Sarandos said he would watch competitors who continued pursuing the China market for years eventually reaching the same result.

But in light of the tariff wars, that also means “we’re one of the rare companies in the U.S. that has no exposure to China,” Sarandos said.

Netflix’s services may be global, but Sarandos emphasized it’s a U.S. company that contributes to the national economy, just like manufacturers, automakers and other industries.

From 2020 to 2024, Netflix has contributed $125 million to the U.S. economy and created 140,000 production jobs, he said. Netflix has filmed in all 50 states, has 9,000 employees and owns five million square feet of studio and office space, primarily in California.

“The lion’s share of our business is in the U.S.,” Sarandos said. But online streaming “gets overlooked as an industry. We get kind of thrown under the bus in trade deals occasionally. People forget that this is a real business.”