Chinese viewers have rarely been able to watch Netflix shows — that won’t be the case anymore.
Thanks to a licensing deal with local video portal company iQiyi, several Netflix original series are set to enter China, the U.S.-based streaming giant confirmed for TheWrap on Tuesday.
“It’s great that people in China will be able to enjoy some of our original series,” a Netflix spokesperson said.
For a brief time, Netflix’s “House of Cards” was available — and popular — in China. It was removed from a local streamer for regulatory reasons after a brief run, however, and Netflix had all but given up hope on cracking the tricky market again.
The Baidu-owned iQiyi recently raised $1.53 billion to help build out what will become its Netflix platform, according to TechCrunch. Meanwhile, Netflix just offered 1 billion Euro in new debt for “general corporate purposes,” which the company said includes “content acquisitions, capital expenditures, investments, working capital and potential acquisitions and strategic transactions.”
Netflix had previously announced plans to spend $6 billion on content this year.
Last week, Netflix revealed its first-quarter 2017 financial results. For the three months ending on March 31, Netflix reported revenue of $2.6 billion and earnings of 40 cents a share. That easily topped the slightly less-than $2 billion in revenue and earnings of 6 cents a share the company pulled in during the same time last year, and exceeded analyst estimates of 37 cents a share in earnings. Revenue was right in line with analyst projections.
Unfortunately, Netflix fell shy of its subscriber growth estimate for the first three months of 2017, pushing the company’s stock price in the wrong direction. This morning’s news sent shares soaring though — take a look here:
