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.
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.
