Ted Sarandos and Greg Peters aren’t worried about Paramount‘s hostile bid for Warner Bros.
The Netflix co-CEOs addressed the elephant in the room right at the beginning of a session at a UBS conference in New York Monday afternoon.
“Today’s move was entirely expected,” Sarandos said. “We have a deal done, and we are really happy with the deal for shareholders, for consumers, it’s a great way to create and protect jobs in the entertainment industry. We’re super confident we are going to get it across.”
“I think we want to start by saying it’s not our position to tell the regulators how to think about this,” Peters said about regulatory scrutiny. “They have to do their work and define the market the way that they do it. Clearly, they’ll do their analysis, and we’ll support them with whatever they need in that regard. But if we go back to the fundamentals of this deal, we are very confident that regulators should and will approve it. At the end of the day, it’s pro consumer.”
The executives were the main event of an otherwise typical Wall Street confab. Ten minutes before they were set to go on stage, every seat in the conference center inside UBS’ New York headquarters was taken, as the back of the room filled up with people wanting to listen to what they had to say.
In the conversation with UBS analyst John Hodulik, Sarandos and Peters emphasized that they do not intend to shut down parts of the company, and will operate the studios and HBO as they are currently. In fact, Sarandos reaffirmed that Netflix will be committed to theatrical releases.
“In this transaction, we pick up three businesses basically that we’re not currently in, meaning we have no redundancies currently, but one of them is a motion picture studio with a theatrical distribution machine,” Sarandos said. “There’s been a lot of speculation what we would do with this. I think it’s important to note that all we are going to do with this is staying deeply committed to releasing those movies exactly the way they’ve released the movies today, all three of these new businesses we want to keep operating largely as they are, the theatrical business we have not talked a lot about in the past, about wanting to do it, because we’ve never been in that business. When this deal closes, we are in that business, and we’re going to do it.”
“We didn’t buy this company to destroy that value,” he continued.
As for HBO, “this is a prestige television brand that people really love, and I would say that they have been doing gymnastics to make themselves into a general entertainment brand,” Sarandos said. “I think under this transaction, they don’t have to do that anymore. We’re already a very well established general entertainment brand. We want HBO to double down on the things that people have loved for 50 years.”
The pair said that unlike Paramount, they are not planning to consolidate studios, and pointed out the billions in efficiencies that Paramount is pursuing. They framed the deal as saving jobs, not cutting jobs, and that leadership at the division level at WBD would be tapped to keep doing their jobs.
And they made the argument that Netflix does not dominate the streaming business at all, bringing along a graphic that was displayed on screens beside the stage, with Nielsen Gauge data that showed Netflix behind YouTube an Disney in terms of total TV time spent. If Paramount acquired Warner Bros., they would also be above Netflix, the executives argued,
Their interview came just hours after Paramount, led by David Ellison, launched a hostile tender offer for Warner Bros., seeking to peel off the company from Netflix’s grasp.
“The Paramount offer for the entirety of WBD provides shareholders $18 billion more in cash than the Netflix consideration,” Paramount said in its bid. “WBD’s Board of Directors recommendation of the Netflix transaction over Paramount’s offer is based on an illusory prospective valuation of Global Networks that is unsupported by the business fundamentals and encumbered by high levels of financial leverage assigned to the entity.”
Netflix has been strategic in its pursuit of Warner Bros., including a secret meeting between Sarandos and President Trump last month, which the deal came up. Trump subsequently called Sarandos “fantastic” but nonetheless said the deal could be “problematic.”
Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner is among the backers of Paramount’s bid for Warners.
Sarandos addressd the Trump factor at the UBS conference, saying that “the President cares deeply about American industry, and he loves the entertainment industry.
“I’ve talked to him many times since the election about the different challenges facing the entertainment industry,” he continued. “He definitely understands the dynamics of what we were just talking about … what the President has been interested in this deal has been to what extent does it create jobs in America. And he understands what we do, which is that we drive a ton of work in America.”
As the allotted time wound down, Sarandos turned to those in the crowd, spanning the finance and investing world.
“I just want to say something to the folks in this room, the folks on the stream, many of whom have been owners of Netflix for the long haul, where we’ve navigated some really complicated things, is that we are going into a deal that we are really excited about,” Sarandos said, looking around the room in the basement of the UBD building. “We think this deal for Warner Bros, is good for shareholders. We think it’s good for consumers. We think it’s good for creators. We think it’s great for the entertainment industry as a whole, because we’re creating and protecting jobs and production and we can continue to grow the business.
“We’re really excited about it, and we just wanted to say to all of you that we appreciated you sticking with us through these things and this is in many ways, not as complicated as many of the things we’ve already done,” he added. “So we look forward to the next phase of this, getting this deal approved and moving forward.”
