- Shares of Spotify dipped Wednesday.
- The company reported first-quarter earnings that beat on both the top and bottom lines.
- But Spotify reported some weakness in ad-supported revenue and missed estimates slightly on paid subscribers.
Shares of Spotify dipped Wednesday after the company reported its first-quarter 2022 earnings.
The stock was down 10% in the morning amid what’s been a tough earnings season for tech stocks.
Here are the key numbers:
- Earnings per share: 21 euro cents vs an estimated loss of 24 euro cents, per Refinitiv
- Revenue: 2.66 billion euros vs 2.62 billion euros, per Refinitiv
The company, which has heavily invested in its podcasting business and is trying to grow ads in the space, said ad-supported revenue came in at 282 million euros. That made up 11% of its total revenue, which the company said was its largest first-quarter ever for the segment. Still, it missed analyst expectations of 304.1 million euros in ad-supported revenue, according to FactSet.
Spotify ended the quarter with 182 million paid subscribers, which is up 15% year-over-year but falls below its original forecast of 183 million. The company said exiting Russia led to a loss of 1.5 million subscribers. Revenue from subscriptions grew to 2.38 billion euros, up 23% year-over-year.
Spotify reached 422 million MAUs in its first quarter, up 19% year-over-year and exceeding its own guidance by 4 million. It also beat analyst expectations, according to a FactSet consensus.
Spotify had 4 million podcasts on its platform at the end of the quarter, up from 3.6 million in the fourth quarter of 2021. Growth in the number of monthly active users, or MAUs, which engaged with its podcasts have continued to outpace total MAU growth, while podcast share of overall consumption hours on the platform reached an all-time high, the company said.
Spotify said that during March, when there was a brief service outage that caused users to be automatically logged out of the platform, about 3 million users likely created new accounts to log back in. The company said that in April, one month after the outage, it saw a reversal of that benefit.
Spotify expects to post 428 million monthly active users in its second quarter, which reflects a loss from the closure of its Russian operations as well as the full reversal of its March service outage benefit. For total paid subscribers, Spotify is expecting to reach a total of 187 million.
This article was originally published on cnbc.com
