Roku completed its IPO with 18 million shares sold along with a 2.35 million allocation of additional shares by the underwriter at $14. The IPO valued the company at $2 billion. The share price surged to around $26, but settled back at around $22.
Analyst Comment
Although the company is most widely known as the seller of dongles, Roku’s real opportunity is to be one of the key platforms for SmartTVs and other OTT video devices. If you don’t have the scale to build your own platform (and really only LG & Samsung have that scale at the moment), then there are really only a handful of options to get apps and OTT video onto the TV. The three biggest are Android TV, Vewd (previously OperaTV) and Roku. Each has advantages and disadvantages, there is no perfect solution, so multiple approaches are likely to co-exist. Roku’s key advantage, in my view, is the simplicity and usability of its interface, but the downside of that is less differentiation in the user interface. (BR)
