Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos says that the entertainment industry “certainly gets overlooked” and “throw under the bus” when it comes to trade deals.
In an interview at Semafor’s World Economy Summit on Wednesday, the executive said that the streamer contributed $125 billion to the U.S. economy between 2020 and 2024, creating 140,000 production jobs across 500 productions in all 50 states.
“The lion’s share of our investment is in the US. So we have 9,000 employees and 3 million feet of studio and 2 million feet of office space, primarily in California, he said. “But I do think it gets overlooked as as an industry. So we get kind of thrown under the bus in trade deals occasionally. People forget this is a real business. You hardly ever see a sitting president photographed on a studio lot.”
In addition to its investment in the U.S., Netflix recently announced a $1 billion investment in Mexico in February. “I was thinking, if we were building a plant to build a billion dollars with the cars there, the President would certainly announce that,” Sarandos said.”So it’s very exciting.”
When asked if the Trump administration is “getting it wrong” by putting an increased emphasis on manufacturing rather than services broadly, Sarandos replied: “I think it’s feasible that there’s an evolution in the culture around the way people want to work, and how they work, what they value that is more aligned with what you’re talking about.”
He also revealed that Netflix originally struck a deal to license its content in China 15 years ago to a company called iQIYI, but that it was ultimately not cleared by the country’s government-controlled censorship board.
“In three years, not a single episode of a single Netflix show cleared. They had they had no interest in us being in China,” Sarandos said. “So for me, I watched everybody spend the next decade grinding out all of their time to get there, and ultimately ended up in the same place I did, which is nowhere.”
That failed deal would pay off for the streamer, who is now one of the rare companies in the U.S. who has no exposure to China, he noted. The Trump administration has levied a 145% tariff on Chinese goods
“There’s a big business that in the rest of the world that is happy to host Netflix,” Sarandos added.
More to come…
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