Roku income got here in above Wall Road forecasts for the fourth quarter of 2023 — and it touted new milestones of greater than 80 million lively accounts globally as of the tip of final yr and greater than 100 billion hours streamed in 2023.
However shares of the streaming platform and connected-TV advert supplier fell as Roku warned of a “difficult” surroundings for media and leisure spending for the remainder of 2024.
The corporate reported This fall income of $984.4 million (up 14%) and a web lack of $78.3 million (55 cents per share) in contrast with a web lack of $237.1 million a yr earlier. On common, Wall Road analysts anticipated income of $968.2 million and a web lack of 54 cents per share, in keeping with LSEG information. Roku’s steerage for This fall had been income of $955 million and a web lack of $85 million.
Roku, in its letter to shareholders, stated it plans to extend income and free money stream and obtain profitability over time. Nonetheless, “we stay conscious of near-term challenges within the macro surroundings and an uneven advert market restoration. Whereas we’ll face tough [year over year] development price comparisons in streaming companies distribution and a difficult M&E surroundings for the remainder of the yr, we anticipate to keep up our This fall 2023 YoY Platform development charges in Q1,” the corporate stated.
For the fourth quarter, Roku’s Platform income was $828.9 million, up 13%, which it stated mirrored “robust contributions from streaming companies distribution actions and video promoting” that was offset by decrease media and leisure promotional spending. Common income per account was $39.92 in This fall (on a trailing 12-month foundation), down 4% yr over yr, which Roku stated was because of a bigger share of its lively accounts in worldwide markets “the place we’re presently centered on rising scale and engagement.”
For Q1 of 2024, Roku is projecting whole web income of $850 million (which might be up 15%), whole gross revenue of roughly $370 million and break-even adjusted EBITDA.
In after-hours buying and selling Thursday, Roku inventory dropped greater than 15%. Earlier this week, Roku’s inventory dropped practically 9% after the Wall Road Journal reported that Walmart was in talks to amass Vizio, a competitor to Roku within the connected-TV promoting enterprise, for greater than $2 billion.
In saying the outcomes, Roku boasted that it now has greater than 80 million lively accounts, a web improve of 10 million for 2023, whereas whole streaming hours final yr have been a file 106.0 billion, up 18.6 billion hours (21%) from the yr prior. For This fall, customers streamed a median of 4.1 hours per day per account. Moreover, within the U.S., Roku’s lively account base is now larger than the subscribers of the six largest conventional U.S. pay-TV suppliers mixed.
“Because the main TV streaming platform, Roku goals to make tv higher for everybody,” Anthony Wooden, founder and CEO, stated in a press release. “In a world the place sooner or later all TV might be streamed, we’re immensely proud to be the programmer of the house display screen for greater than 80 million lively accounts across the globe, connecting individuals on to what they love to observe.”
On the Selection Leisure Summit at CES final month, Roku Media president Charlie Collier additionally pushed the streaming firm’s narrative that over the long run TV viewing is inevitably migrating to web distribution. “We’re going to be the lead-in to most of tv, if not all of tv,” Collier, the previous Fox Leisure and AMC Networks exec who joined Roku in 2022, stated on the occasion.
