Roku, the streaming device maker and content aggregator, raced to a new all-time high on Wall Street on Friday morning, one day after the company posted an unexpected Q3 profit.
About an hour into trading on Friday, Roku was up 11% and had hit $250 per share, easily running past its previous all-time high of $239.14. The Los Gatos, California-based company started the year trading near $137 per share, dropped to below $65 per share when the coronavirus pandemic hit the U.S. in mid-March, and has since bounced nearly 400%, as more people have stayed inside streaming during the pandemic.
On Thursday afternoon, Roku reported revenue of $452 million for Q3, up 73% from the same time last year. Roku’s sales also trounced analyst projections of $367.5 million. (About three-fourths of its Q3 revenue came from on-platform advertising, while the rest came from device sales.) The company also reported gross profit spiked 81% year-over-year to $215 million, translating to earnings of 9 cents per share — a surprise considering analysts expected Roku to lose 42 cents per share.
Viewers watched 200 million more hours of content than they did last quarter, totaling 14.8 billion hours spent streaming on Roku in Q3. Per account, that comes out to 3.57 hours spent streaming each day. That’s a lot of streaming, but falls short of previous quarters, like Q1, when Roku accounts averaged 3.75 hours of streaming per day.
Roku’s active accounts now stand at 46 million overall, after the company added another 2.9 million during the third quarter. Entering Q3, Roku held 31% of the U.S. streaming device market, tied with Amazon Fire TV for the biggest cut of market share.
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