Roblox's stock slides as losses expand, bookings come up short

By Emily Bary

'We will see leverage against pretty much all of the cost areas over the next 12 months,' CFO says

Roblox Corp. shares were tanking nearly 19% in Wednesday morning trading after the gaming company fell short of bookings expectations for the second quarter and saw its losses swell.

The company logged a net loss of $283 million, or 46 cents a share, compared with a loss of $176 million, or 30 cents a share, in the same period a year ago. Analysts tracked by FactSet were anticipating a 44-cent loss per share.

Nonetheless, Roblox's (RBLX) management expressed optimism about opportunities to reduce costs moving forward.

"We will see leverage against pretty much all of the cost areas over the next 12 months," Chief Financial Officer Michael Guthrie said on the earnings call, according to a transcript provided by AlphaSense/Sentieo. "We think we'll see a little bit of leverage in cost of goods sold because we've slowed down hiring."

He also said he sees room for operating leverage against compensation expenses as the company "slowed down a little bit" in terms of infrastructure and trust and safety.

"It will really depend on both a combination of how the costs roll out and how fast our top line grows, obviously," he continued.

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Revenue for the latest quarter rose to $680.8 million from $591.2 million, while analysts were looking for $665.9 million.

Bookings increased 22% to $780.7 million, though analysts were modeling $787 million. Roblox categorizes bookings as its revenue plus the change in deferred revenue during a given period and said that "substantially all" of its bookings are derived from sales of virtual currency.

"We believe bookings provide a timelier indication of trends in our operating results that are not necessarily reflected in our revenue, because we recognize the majority of revenue over the estimated average lifetime of a paying user," the company added in its shareholder letter.

Executives cheered the company's artificial-intelligence opportunities in that letter.

"Recent advances in the sector enable us to create a multimodal generative AI model that works with all types of content -- images, code, 3D models, audio, avatar creation, and more," they said. "Roblox is uniquely positioned to build this generative model given our large data set of 3D models and experiences, live avatar behavior, and moderation data."

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-Emily Bary

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08-09-23 1022ET

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