Netflix: Winner Amid Downturn

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- Netflix(NFLX) is one of the few winners on Tuesday, as the market tumbles on Japan fears.

The movie rental company is gaining 3.1% to $207.39 this morning, following an upgrade by Goldman Sachs. The brokerage firm raised its rating to buy from neutral and lifted its price target on the stock to $300.

Analyst Ingrid Chung also upped her subscriber estimates for 2015 to 60 million users from her prior estimate of 50 million.

The stock move comes as Wall Street has feared Netflix is losing its momentum as other players like Amazon, Apple and Google express interest in dipping their toes in the streaming movies market.

But Chung says Netflix has the scale to ward off these competitors and argues that content costs are a high and the company has set the bar low on price for the customer.

"We believe that the demand for video streaming could be big enough to sustain multiple business models and competitors and that these models can co-exist," she wrote in a note.

Last week Facebook announced that it has partnered with Warner Bros. to stream movies on its social networking site.

"In the near-term, this offering is more of a threat to current forms of [videos on demand], such as iTunes and Amazon," Chung wrote.

Chung raised her 2011 revenue estimate to $3.12 billion from a $3.09 billion. She now expects earnings of $4.56 a share from $4.52.

--Written by Jeanine Poggi in New York.

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