Netflix reports £1.4bn revenue last year from UK subscribers
Netflix, the US streaming service with hits including The Crown and Stranger Things, has revealed its annual revenue from UK subscribers for the first time – £1.4bn in 2021 – after changing its accounting practices in a move that also resulted in a big increase in its corporation tax payment to nearly £7m.
Netflix’s main UK business reported a 1,630% increase in revenues last year, up from just £79m in 2020, after abandoning the widely criticised practice of funnelling British income through other lower-tax European jurisdictions that is commonly utilised by Silicon Valley companies.
The latest UK accounts mark the first time that Netflix has not accounted for the £1bn-plus it makes annually from the monthly fees paid by British subscribers through separate accounts at its European headquarters in the Netherlands.
The move to reallocate all revenues from its 13.8 million UK subscribers to its British subsidiaries in turn fuelled an almost tripling of pre-tax profits from £10.6m to £27.9m at Netflix Services UK, the main entity the streaming company has registered at Companies House.
Last year, Netflix paid almost £7m in UK corporation tax on total profits of £31.7m across the three businesses it has registered in the country, the most it has paid since launching in the UK in 2012. It is almost double the £4m paid in 2020.
In November 2020, Netflix, which reinvests a significant proportion of its revenuesinto a £1bn annual budget making TV shows and films in the UK, pledged to start declaring the income from British subscribers annually from 2021.
Last week it emerged that Facebook UK paid £29.8m in corporation tax having made £3.3bn in gross revenues from advertisers. Google, which owns YouTube, paid £200m in tax; the research
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