Roku reported the addition of 3.7 million active user accounts in the fourth quarter, ending 2021 with 60.1 active accounts.
That beat the forecasts of skittish equity analysts, who predicted Roku would add less than half of the 5.2 million active accounts it tacked on in Q4 2020.
However, Roku was badly off target when it came to total revenue, making $865.3 million in the final three months of 2021. That represented a 33% year-over-year jump, but it was around $30 million less than what analysts had pegged.
Also read: Roku (Not Surprisingly) Mulls Building Its Own Smart TVs
The sum total was more really bad news for the Silicon Valley video technology company on the Nasdaq, where it saw its stock price tumble more than 15% in after hours trading ... after dropping more than 10% during active day trading Thursay. Roku is trading at just under $121 a share at the moment this sentence is being typed, after trading at more than $482 a share last July.
Quite simply, Roku -- the most popular supplier of streaming operating system software in North America -- keeps growing. But Roku's rate of growth keeps slowing, and investors keep thinking that Roku is about to be surpassed by Amazon and Google at any moment.
Indeed, nearly every key metric for Roku expanded in a significant way in Q4, but it didn't grow as much as it did in the same three-month period of the quarantined year of 2020.
Users spent 19.5 billion hours on the Roku platform in Q4, 1.5 billion more than in Q3, but that expansion of engagement is surpassed by the 2.2 billion hours of growth that occurred in Q4 2020.
"Platform" revenue, which is mostly from selling ads on content that runs on Roku, was up nearly 21% quarter over quarter to $703 million, after growing by 47.6% in the same period of 2020.
Meanwhile, average revenue per users grew by 2.3% to $41.03 in Q4, after expanding by 6.5% in the same period of 2020.
Gross profit, which swelled by over 42% in the fourth quarter of 2020, grew by only 4.3% in Q4 of last year to $379.6 million.
And on and on it goes ... and down and down Roku has went, since peaking last July.
Meanwhile, as Roku makes an expensive pivot into ad-supported streaming, making major programming investments into its Roku Channel, total operating expenses were up in Q4, increasing by 21.4% sequentially and by a whopping 49% year over year.
And then there are global supply chain issues.
Maintaining consumer price points on Roku gadgets, including smart TVs made by third party manufacturers who license the Roku OS, is key for Roku to expand active users ... and virtually all of Roku's other key metrics. When someone buys a Roku gadget, chances are they're going turn into an active user, after all, gobbling up engagement hours and advanced advertising impressions.
But making Roku hardware takes computer chips and is more expensive to do than ever. After reporting a narrow $4.6 million profit in Q4 2020, at the outset of the global supply chain crisis, Roku reported a $45.9 million "player" sector operating loss from this past October - December, as the company bled money on every gadget it sold in order to sustain sales volumes.
So there you have it -- a company used by more consumers than any other in the U.S., Canada and Mexico to stream video, and which is still growing, remains in stock-market free-fall.
Roku's wild ride continues.
