Roku shares soared on Monday after the company known for its streaming video devices reported impressive growth in the number of its active users and streaming hours.
The company’s shares were up 25% at the market’s close on Monday to $42.18, highlighting Wall Street’s enthusiasm with Roku reporting a 40% year-over-year jump in active accounts to 27 million for the company’s 2018 fiscal fourth quarter. Roku shared preliminary results from its latest quarter during the week of the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. A company spokesperson said that Roku released this data early so it could share the results with partners during business meetings at CES.
Roku’s active accounts, which are the number of distinct user accounts that have streamed media from Roku’s services, are an important measure of the company’s financial health, according to the company’s regulatory filings. The “active account” number doesn’t track individual uses of the Roku’s services, like family members who access Roku from a shared account, the filings said.
Additionally, Roku said that about 7.3 billion hours of content were streamed from the Roku platform in the company’s fourth quarter, which was a 68% jump from the previous year during the same time period. Roughly 24 billion hours of video were streamed via Roku’s platform in 2018, which was 61% increase from 2017, the company said.
Financial data firm FactSet originally forecast Roku to report 6.6 billion streaming hours for its latest quarter, which means the company easily surpassed some analyst projections, as CNBC noted.
Investors are closely tracking Roku’s growth in light of fierce competitors like Amazon, Google, and Apple which sell their own streaming video devices like Amazon’s Fire TV, Google’s Chromecast, and Apple TV.
So far, Roku has been able to keep its lead as the top video streaming device maker. In May, for instance, research firm Parks Associates said Roku was the market leader in the Internet video streaming device category, with 37% share. Amazon was second with 28% of the market, followed by Apple with 15% and Google with 14%. Parks Associates analysts said that consumers found Roku’s devices easier to use compared to other devices.
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Wall Street is looking for Roku to continue showing high growth as it fends off from bigger, wealthier companies and eventually translate that growth into revenue that can offset its losses. The company logged $137.3 million in sales for its third quarter, but had a net loss of $9.5 million.
Because Roku only released preliminary data from its fiscal fourth quarter, the company didn’t provide any outlook for future sales.