Results for third-quarter top Street estimates
Roblox Corp. shares soared in the extended session Monday after the social-gaming platform reported its October performance will still top last year’s, despite a three-day outage over the Halloween weekend.
Roblox RBLX, -1.27% shares rallied as much as 36% after hours and ended the extended session up 28%. That followed a 1.3% decline in the regular session to close at $77.00.
The company said a three-day outage around Halloween will cost the company about $25 million in bookings, and $6 million in bookings for which developers were not compensated. The company said it will credit $6.8 million to those who relied on income from the platform.
The company defines bookings as “revenue plus the change in deferred revenue during the period and other non-cash adjustments.” The importance of bookings comes into play as the company sells virtual currency on its site that may be considered deferred revenue.
Using the first 27 days of October, Roblox said bookings were between $177 million and $179 million in 2021, or 30% to 34% above the same period a year ago. The company said it had expected monthly bookings of $189 million to $192 million, compared with last year’s $165.1 million. So, even with the outage, bookings for October gained 7% to 8%.
All told, Roblox expects October revenue of between $177 million to $180 million, compared with last year’s full October revenue of $94.7 million, or a gain of 87%.
October’s user engagement stats slipped because of the outage, but they’ll still top last year’s. Average daily active users, or DAUs, for the first 27 days of the month were 50.5 million, up 43% over the same year-ago period. Because of the outage, average DAUs for October declined to 47.1 million, but that’s still above October 2020’s full-month average DAUs of 35.5 million.
Roblox, which began trading as a public company in March, also reported a third-quarter loss of $74 million, or 13 cents a share, compared with a loss of $48.6 million, or 26 cents a share, in the year-ago period.
Revenue rose to $509.3 million from $251.9 million in the year-ago quarter, while bookings grew to $637.8 million from $496.5 million in the year-ago period.
Analysts, on average, had forecast a loss of 14 cents a share on bookings of $618.8 million. Last earnings report, FactSet’s Wall Street consensus for revenue was compared against Roblox’s reported bookings.
“We’re very pleased that during the third quarter, people of all ages from across the globe chose to spend over 11 billion hours on Roblox,” said David Baszucki, Roblox chief executive, in a statement.
“We are happy to report that the developer community earned over $130 million in the quarter and is on pace to earn well over $500 million this year,” Baszucki said. “As we finish 2021 and head into 2022, we will continue to invest in innovative technology to enable our developer community to do what they do best — build and create.”
“Growth in all of our core metrics — DAUs, hours, and bookings — displayed strong year-over-year growth despite lapping COVID-impacted periods and back-to-school seasonality,” added Michael Guthrie, Roblox chief financial officer, in a statement. In the third quarter, DAUs rose 31% to 47.3 million.