Netflix Shakes Up German-Language Team With Departures Of Kai Finke & Marc Van Den Bosch Mprah
EXCLUSIVE: Netflix EMEA has shed two executives working in its licensing and co-production team amid a shakeup in its German-language unit.
Amsterdam-based vet Kai Finke quietly left in recent months after joining Netflix back in 2015 and serving as Director Content, Licensing & Co-Productions, focusing on European and German productions.
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During his tenure he worked on series including Freud and Undercover and movies such as Rising High and Black Island.
Within Finke’s team, Netflix Germany’s Marc van den Bosch Mprah, Head of Acquisitions & Co-Production, has also left the streamer after joining two years ago. Among movies he worked on was Early Birds, the team’s first Swiss co-production with HugoFilm and CH Media.
Netflix’s director of non-fiction shows for German-speaking Europe, Inga Leschek, left the streamer for RTL earlier this year.
Katja Hofem continues to lead the German content team across series, films, non-fiction, and acquisitions. Hofem and van den Bosch Mprah were in the middle of a recent licensing deal with local studio Constantin.
Netflix declined to comment on the reasons for the two latest departures or whether the positions would be filled but they come as a number of international studios and broadcasters are making cuts amid global economic pressures and two Hollywood strikes.
EMEA is Netflix’s second-biggest region in terms of full-time employees with 2,000, so these don’t represent large cuts. However, given the climate, sources who regularly work with the streamer in Europe tell us they wouldn’t be surprised to see further changes within local teams before year end.
The streamer let go its director of U.K. features Fiona Lamptey this spring after two and a half years. Late last year — following a swathe of cuts in the U.S. — David Kosse left his post as VP of International Film amid a restructure of the company’s European content business. Separately, in the U.S. this spring the streamer moved on from longtime film execs Lisa Nishimura and Ian Bricke amid a reorganization of the film group, which saw the arrival of Warner Bros exec Peter Dodd.
Netflix’s Q2 global revenue stood at $8.2BN with net income of $1.5BN off the back of 238.4M paid memberships. Global content spend is estimated to maintain at around $17BN in 2023 and 2024. Netflix’s two most recent quarterly earnings reports have shown that its largest subscriber growth has come from Europe, which has a similar number of subs to the U.S.
Finke joined Netflix from German distributor Telepool, spending close to eight years there over two stints. He also worked at Vodafone.
Van den Bosch Mprah previously worked at Super RTL, Warner Bros, Viacom and Discovery.
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