(Bloomberg) -- Roblox Corp. shares slid Thursday morning after the operator of a popular video-game platform for kids said Chief Financial Officer Michael Guthrie is stepping down to pursue personal interests.
The departure of Guthrie, who has been at Roblox since 2018 and helped shepherd the company through its 2021 stock market listing, overshadowed an otherwise positive earnings report. The shares were down 4% to $39.87 at 10:25 a.m. in New York.
Bookings, a measure of sales, will be $1 billion to $1.03 billion in the third quarter, the company said Thursday in a statement. That compares with the $935.8 million average of analysts estimates, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. In the second quarter, bookings rose 22% from a year earlier to $955.2 million, also beating analysts’ expectations. The company boosted its forecast for full-year bookings to as much as $4.23 billion.
On May 9, Roblox shares tumbled 22%, the most in more than two years, after management’s forecast for second-quarter bookings missed Wall Street’s estimates. Across the industry, video-game businesses have been grappling with a drop in player engagement after a record surge during the pandemic. To address the “unseasonable growth rate declines” that began in the first quarter, Roblox said Thursday it has made improvements to its artificial intelligence-driven discovery algorithm the positioning of various content on its homepage, and created dynamic price floors in the marketplace, among other changes.
“As demonstrated by our results today, the positive impacts of these ongoing efforts continued” through the first month of the third quarter, the company said in a letter to shareholders.
Guthrie will stay in his role as Roblox searches for a new CFO, the company said.
Roblox is investing more in advertising, which represents a small but growing part of its business. The company has penned partnerships with brands like PacSun for in-game billboards, and in May announced video ads with brands like Elf Beauty Inc., Walmart Inc., and Warner Bros.
In the second quarter, Roblox said 79.5 million people logged in every day to play the San Mateo, California-based company’s user-made games. That compares with analysts’ estimates of 77.1 million. Growth was particularly strong with users 13 and older, the company said.
As a platform that’s particularly popular with minors, Roblox has struggled to keep predators off its site. Bloomberg reported earlier this month on the site’s pedophile problem. Since 2018, US police have arrested at least two dozen people accused of abusing or abducting children they’d met or groomed through the platform. Chief Safety Officer Matt Kaufman said safety is “foundational” to the platform and rejected the idea that Roblox has a systemic child endangerment problem.
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