Roku shares surge as company halves quarterly losses

Shares of Roku surged 14% Friday, notching a new 52-week high, on earnings that beat Wall Street expectations.

In an interview on CNBC’s “Squawk Box,” CEO Anthony Wood said more than half of U.S. broadband households now watch TV with Roku.

Wood said the company added more than four million new streaming households during its most recent quarter and is on track to reach 100 million streaming households in the next year.

The company’s growth was driven in part by the Roku user experience, including promoting content on its home screen, Wood told CNBC’s Julia Boorstin.

“We’re the No. 1 streaming operating system in the country and in most of the Americas by a wide margin,” he said.

Here’s how the company performed for the fourth quarter compared with what Wall Street was expecting, based on a survey of analysts by LSEG:

• Loss per share: 24 cents vs. a loss of 40 cents expected
• Revenue: $1.2 billion vs. $1.14 billion expected

The company boosted revenue by 22% to $1.2 billion. It reported a net loss for the period of $35.5 million, or 24 cents per share, an improvement from a net loss of $78.3 million, or 55 cents per share, during the same quarter a year earlier.

Roku reported 89.8 million streaming households as of the end of 2024, a 12% year-over-year increase. Beginning next quarter, the company no longer expects to report that metric as it streamlines earnings reports to focus on revenue and profitability numbers.

Roku also reported an 18% year-over-year increase in streaming hours in the fourth quarter, with a focus on continuing to grow ad demand through “deeper third-party platform integrations,” the company said in its earnings release.

“Advertising is a big part of our business, and so a big focus for us in our strategy is to continue to grow demand by working with third-party partners,” Wood said.

The company is forecasting net revenue of $1 billion and gross profit of $450 million for the first quarter of 2025.