Roblox Corp. shares soared in the extended session Monday after the social-gaming platform reported results for the quarter that topped Wall Street estimates and gave an update on damages from a recent three-day outage.
Roblox RBLX,
The company, which began publicly trading its shares in March, 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 $509.4 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.
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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.
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.
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“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. 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, average daily active users, or DAUs, rose 31% to 47.3 million.
Concerning a three-day outage around Halloween, Roblox said it would compensate those creators who relied on income from the platform.
“We estimated that lost bookings during the outage period was $25 million. In addition, there were $6 million of bookings received during the outage (primarily from prepaid cards) for which our developers were not compensated, for a total of $31 million,” the company said in a letter to investors.
