Roku Reels After Q4 Numbers Disappoint Wall Street; Streaming Provider Reaches 60M Active Accounts
deadline.comRoku shares continued their slide after the closing bell after the streaming company issued a disappointing fourth-quarter earnings report.Shares in the company fell 10% during the regular session, closing at $144.71.
They dropped another 12% in after-hours trading before recovering slightly, but staying in the red.Revenue of $865.3 million fell short of Wall Street analysts’ consensus forecast.
Earnings per share topped estimates, reaching 17 cents, but there were enough other worrisome trends to cast a shadow. The company said it has reached 60.1 million active accounts, another encouraging milestone and a 17% uptick from the same period in 2020.After starting out as a maker of connected TV devices, Roku years ago began a successful effort to license its user interface to smart TV makers, which is now in one-third of all North American smart TVs.
In the quarter, though, overall U.S. TV unit sales fell below pre-Covid 2019 levels.“Some of our Roku TV OEM partners were hit particularly hard with inventory challenges, which negatively impacted their unit sales figures and market share in Q4,” the company said in its quarterly shareholder letter. “These reduced Roku TV model sales were partially offset by our player unit sales, which remained above pre-Covid 2019 levels and down only 4% year-over-year (despite comparing against a pandemic-driven surge in 2020).”The company said its average revenue per user ($41.03, up 43% from a year ago) as well as “careful management of our streaming player supply chain and inventory” helped keep rising material and shipping costs from hitting the company’s device business.
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