Last night's trading on the United States markets saw something rather incredible happen with the Netflix Inc (NASDAQ: NFLX) share price.
It was a tough night for most of the US markets last night (our time). America's Wednesday session saw the Dow Jones Industrial Average Index (DJX: .DJI) crash 0.98%, while the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite Index (NASDAQ: .IXIC) cratered an even worse 1.62%.
Initially, it wasn't much better for the Netflix share price. The US streaming giant and tech share closed ordinary trading down a hefty 2.26% to US$346.19 a share.
But what happened in after-hours trading is what's truly remarkable. By the time the after-hours markets had closed, Netflix stock had vaulted back up to US$390.61 a share. That's a gain of 12.83% over where the company closed at during normal trading.
The catalyst for this extraordinary after-hours surge was Netflix's latest quarterly earnings report.
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Netflix share price surges on stunning quarterly earnings
As our Fool colleagues over in the United States went into this morning, Netflix reported quarterly revenue of US$8.54 billion for the third quarter of 2023, 7.8% higher than the US$8.19 billion from the same quarter last year.
Net income came in at US$1.68 billion, again a pleasing rise over last year's figure of US$1.4 billion. This enabled Netflix to declare diluted earnings per share (EPS) of US$3.73, a 20.3% surge over the US$3.10 per share reported for 2022's third quarter.
In terms of raw subscriptions, Netflix was sitting on 247.15 million global streaming paid memberships at the end of the quarter, up 10.8% over the 223.09 million it reported this time last year.
As our Fool colleagues reported, analysts were expecting US$3.49 in earnings per share, as well as 243.88 million subscribers. So these numbers are a handy beat.
This explains why the Netflix share price rocketed so enthusiastically in after-hours trading this morning.
Even so, this latest share price surge doesn't put the Netflix share price even close to the new 52-week high of US$485 that we saw back in June. The streaming giant is also still a very long way from its all-time high of more than US$690 a share that we saw back in October 2021.
