Roblox gears up for significant expansion as Q1 revenues, DAUs soar

Roblox Corp's first post-IPO earnings soar on strong daily active user and revenue surges.

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Roblox Corp just posted up its Q1 2021 earnings, and the results are quite positive. The company earned $387 million in revenues, up 140% over Q1'20. Operating income is likewise up 140% YoY to $164.5 million, which takes the $51 million expensive of Roblox's direct listing into account.

Roblox DAUs hit 42.1 million), up 79% YoY, and DAUs outside of North America were up 87%. Average Robux spending per daily active user was around $15.48.

In-game microtransaction purchases were also up tremendously over last year. Roblox made $652.3 million from Robux virtual currency purchases in Q1, up 161% from last year; $269 million of this was deferred revenue.

"Note that at the time users purchase Robux from us, we also have to play Apple, Google, and other payment processors," the company says in the report, highlighting the 30% commission that platform-holders like Sony, Nintendo, Microsoft, Apple, Google, and Steam take from all mTX revenues.

The company is making significant expansions to its platforms, personnel, and content. Roblox's headcount increased by 403 people to a total of 1,054 employees in Q1 2021, and the games titan says it'll continue this pace in order to build up its ecosystem. Roblox spent $89.5 million on personnel costs as it "continues to hire aggressively."

"The quality of people we are hiring is incredible. This is a positive trend that should enable us to expand our ability to innovate at scale."

Roblox Corp also paid out $118 million to its community creators that make mini games and other playable content.

"We believe we are on track to share nearly half a billion dollars with the community this year. The quality and variety of content on the Roblox platform are both at all-time highs."

In Q1 2021 Roblox also teamed up with Gucci to offer unique in-game items from the brand. Hasbro has teamed up with Roblox to add in Nerf and Monopoly content in fall 2021.

Due to higher development/infrastructure and personnel costs, and increased community payouts, overall costs totaled to $522 million. This led to a loss of $134 million during the quarter. Loss-per-share was at $0.46.

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The corporation says it will continue "investing aggressively" into its community, its development team, and overall infrastructure.

"Our first quarter 2021 results enabled us to continue investing aggressively in the key areas that we believe will drive long term growth and value, specifically hiring talented engineering and product professionals and growing the earnings for our developer community," Roblox CFO Michael Guthrie said.

"We believe we must continue to innovate and so remain focused on building great technology to make progress on our key growth vectors, primarily international expansion and expanding the age demographic of our users."