Netflix has laid off roughly 150 employees due to a drop in memberships.

“We are having to reduce our expense growth as a firm due to our sluggish revenue growth,” the company stated in a statement.

Following its admission last month that it had lost subscribers for the first time in a decade, Netflix announced on Tuesday that it was laying off 150 individuals worldwide, mainly in the United States, accounting for 2% of its entire workforce.

“As we mentioned on results,” Netflix said, “our slowed revenue growth means we’re also needing to restrict our cost growth as a company.” “These changes are generally motivated by business considerations rather than individual performance, making them all the more difficult because none of us wants to say goodbye to such wonderful coworkers.”

Netflix’s chief financial officer, Spencer Neumann, stated on the firm’s first-quarter earnings call in April that the company wanted to cut back on some of its expenditure over the following two years. However, Netflix will invest $17 billion each year in generating new television shows and films, with fewer employees working behind the scenes.

Mr. Neumann said, “We’re trying to be smart about it and prudent in terms of cutting back on some of that expenditure increase to reflect the realities of the business’s revenue growth.”

According to a source familiar with the situation who spoke on anonymity to discuss internal company concerns, further layoffs are likely later this year.

Netflix, which has long been the leader in terms of global subscribers, announced last month that it had lost 200,000 memberships in the first three months of the year and that it expected another two million to leave in the second quarter of 2022. The announcement stunned the entertainment industry, where many businesses have staked their livelihoods on streaming’s sustained growth.

Since the earnings report, Netflix announced that it would allow users to pay less for an ad-supported version of the service, which its management had previously promised would never happen. However, this is very likely to happen by the end of the year. At the same time, Netflix intends to crack down on password sharing, a behavior that the firm claims have cost it income from around 100 million illegitimate customers who are watching but not paying for the service.