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Q1 2025 Roku Inc Earnings Call

In This Article:

Participants

Conrad Grodd; Vice President, Investor Relations; Roku Inc

Anthony Wood; Chairman of the Board, President, Chief Executive Officer, Founder; Roku Inc

Dan Jedda; Chief Financial Officer; Roku Inc

Charles Collier; President, Roku Media; Roku Inc

Mustafa Ozgen; President - Devices; Roku Inc

Cory Carpenter; Analyst; J.P. Morgan & Co.

Brent Navon; Analyst; Bank of America

Vasily Karasyov; Analyst; Cannonball Research

Justin Patterson; Analyst; KeyBanc

Laura Martin; Analyst; Needham & Company LLC

Matt Thornton; Analyst; FBN Securities

James Heaney; Analyst; Jefferies LLC

Steven Cahall; Analyst; Wells Fargo Securities, LLC

Presentation

Operator

Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Roku first quarter 2025 earnings call. (Operator Instructions) Please be advised today's conference is being recorded.
I would now like to turn the conference over to your speaker today, Conrad Grodd, Vice President of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Conrad Grodd

Thank you, operator. Welcome to Roku's first quarter 2025 earnings call. On today's call are Anthony Wood, Roku's Founder and CEO; Dan Jedda, our CFO; Charlie Collier, President Roku Media; and Mustafa Ozgen, President, Devices. Our full results and additional management commentary are available in our shareholder letter on our IR website at roku.com/investor.
On this call, we'll make forward-looking statements which is subject to risks and uncertainties. Please refer to our shareholder letter and periodic SEC filings for risk factors that could cause our actual results to differ materially from these forward-looking statements.
We'll also present GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures. Reconciliations of non-GAAP measures to the most comparable GAAP financial measures are provided in our shareholder letter. Unless otherwise stated, all comparisons will be against the results for the comparable 2024 period.
With that, operator, our first question, please.

Question and Answer Session

Operator

(Operator Instructions) Cory Carpenter, JPMorgan.

Cory Carpenter

Okay. I wanted to ask what's giving you confidence in reiterating the full year platform guide and EBITDA guide, just given the current market environment and uncertainty around tariffs. And perhaps related to that, could you just talk about the recent trends you're seeing in the platform business and in particular, on the advertising side.

Anthony Wood

Cory, this is Anthony. I'll be happy to take that. And then I'll -- well, I'll take the first part, then I'll turn it over to Charlie to discuss the ads. So yes, that's correct. I mean we are -- in our letter, we reaffirmed our platform revenue and adjusted EBITDA outlook for the full year 2025.
I mean obviously, there's a lot of macro uncertainty, but there's a lot of Roku-specific positives that give us confidence -- give us the confidence to reaffirm our guidance for the full year.
So for example, the shift to streaming is a big secular trend. It continues. We're at the center of it. That's a big driver of our business. Advertisers have already been shifting their budgets from linear to streaming and from direct insertion orders to programmatic.
Those are two big trends that are positive for Roku. And we're seeing that continue. On macro uncertainty, causes advertisers to look for more performance, they start looking for higher ROI, more performant ads and more flexibility.
And Roku's good at all those things. So those are all positive for us. Also if we look at our execution over the last two years, it's really positioned our business to be in a better position to navigate environments like we're seeing now with the macro uncertainty. So for example, we've really diversified our revenue streams. We have more diversified ad products, and we're less reliant on M&E.
We are tapping into more ad demand sources through our deeper integration with third-party DSPs. And we have a lot of supply that continues to grow.
So these are all positive trends in our ad business. If you look at our ad revenue in the quarter, it grew faster than the OTT ad market overall, for example. And then also subscriptions. One of our -- if you just think about the three tiers of our strategy that we're focused on growing platform revenue, one is grow ad revenue by leaning and deepening integrations with our DSPs. Another is to take better advantage of our home screen and the Roku experience, the UI viewers use to discover content.
And the third is subscriptions. Like to really lean into subscriptions. We build tens of millions of Roku subscriptions each month that's growing. Premium subscriptions is a bright spot, and that's continuing to grow. And then another example, today, we announced the acquisition of Frndly, which is a (inaudible) bundle, a subscription service that's growing both on and off Roku -- both on and off the Roku platform. It's also the kind of service that we're -- we have a lot of ability to lean into and grow faster with the platform and promotional tools we have available to us.
So those are some of the reasons we're confident in renewing our outlook for the year. But I'll let Dan add his thoughts on the question as well before we turn it over to Charlie on your question on ads.