A man photographs a Roblox banner displayed, to celebrate the company’s IPO, on the front facade of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) in New York, March 10, 2021.
Brendan McDermid | Reuters
Roblox shares rose around 6% on Wednesday morning after the video game company reported first-quarter results.
Here’s how the company did:
- Loss per share: 44 cent loss vs. 40 cent loss per share expected, according to a Refinitiv survey of analysts.
- Revenue (bookings): $774 million vs. $766 million expected, according to Refinitiv.
The revenue figure is what Roblox calls bookings. It includes sales recognized during the quarter and deferred revenue.
Average daily active users, or DAUs, reached 66 million, up 22% year over year. Engagement hours totaled 14.5 billion, up 23% year over year. Both DAU and engagement growth saw the largest increases among Roblox’s international and 13-and-older segments. Both those numbers are all-time highs for Roblox.
On an analyst call following the earnings report, founder and CEO David Baszucki attributed the bookings growth to “eight quarters of innovation and awesome engineering.”
“And while users of all ages are also growing, older users continue to contribute the most, with those between the ages of 17-24 growing by 35% in Q1 2023 over Q1 2022,” the company said in its earnings release.
The company reported a net loss of $268 million for the quarter, or a loss of 44 cents per share, compared with a net loss of $160.2 million, or a loss of 27 cents per share, in the year-ago quarter.
Amid a broader downturn in tech spending and hiring, the company signaled that it was comfortable with present head count and compensation levels, given “the momentum we see in bookings.” Roblox saw its adjusted revenue, or bookings, grow 23% year over year.
“We can now begin to slow our year-over-year increases in headcount and compensation expenses,” the company said in its earnings release, with bookings growth expected to exceed compensation growth beginning in the first fiscal quarter of 2024 and onward.