SHENZHEN, CHINA - EQS Newswire - 22 November 2019 - Recently, Roku, the largest US streaming platform, released its financial report for the third quarter of 2019. In the third quarter, Roku's revenue reached US$260.9 million, up by 50.5% year-on-year.

Roku's core operating data continued to beat investors' expectations. In particular, its platform revenue achieved US$179.3 million with a year-on-year growth of 79% and its proportion in total revenue increased by 11 percentage points to 69%. Operating data shows that streaming hours increased by 900 million hours to 10.3 billion hours, comparing to last quarter. Moreover, in the past 12 months, average revenue per user (ARPU) was US$22.58, up by 30% year-on-year. In addition, the company has active users of 32.3 million, a net addition of 1.7 million over last quarter. Last but not least, the segment of video advertising generated double revenue, over the corresponding period of last year. According to Roku, Roku TV accounted for more than a third of the smart TVs sold in the US in the first nine months of 2019.

Roku stock price up 11.52% from Nov 7 to Nov 15, since the company released its Q3 earnings after the market close on Nov 6.

As learned, the main reason for better than expected revenue and improved operating data of Roku was attributable to the strategic partnership with TCL Electronics. TCL Electronics is Roku's largest TV partner in the United States. Sales volume of TCL Roku TV accounted for 60% of the total Roku TV sales.    

Roku's financial report points out that TCL Electronics, Roku's largest TV partner, started selling a range of new models in North America this autumn. The TCL Roku TV 8 series, which was recently launched by TCL Electronics in the US, is equipped with the industry-leading 4K HDR and QLED technology and is the first Roku TV to use mini-LED technology.

According to third-party data, in the first three quarters of 2019, the sales volume of TCL brand TVs ranked No.2 with a 16.5% market share in the US market, up by 3.3 percentage points year-on-year, while the market share of Samsung which ranking No.1 decreased by 2.8 percentage points year-on-year from 22.3% to 19.5%. Therefore, the gap between the market share of TCL brand TVs and of Samsung has been significantly narrowed to 3 percentage points, compared with 9.1 percentage points in the same period last year. Moreover, in March and July respectively, TCL brand TVs surpassed Samsung and was No.1 in the US market in terms of sales volume.

Recently, there are seven TCL Roku TVs in the top 10 of Amazon's best-selling TV ranking. In particular, 55-inch TCL TV ranked the first.

In August, TCL Electronics announced that it generated HK$96.02 million from overseas Internet business in the first half of 2019, which is a new segment revenue contributed by the new partnerships with Roku, Google and other partners. The increase in Roku's total revenue in the first three quarters, would further boost TCL Electronics' revenue of overseas Internet business.

The third quarter financial report of Roku states that the company is confident about its fourth quarter performance, so it raised its full-year revenue and gross profit margin forecast for FY2019. Roku raised the midpoint of revenue forecast to US$1.106 billion in FY2019, up by 49% year-on-year which is higher than its prior outlook of 46% year-on-year. Given that TCL Electronics is Roku's largest TV partner, and TCL Electronics started to generate revenue from overseas Internet business partners including Roku, Google, etc., the annual results of both Roku and TCL Electronics would be worth looking forward to.