At first glance, Roku (ROKU +2.32%) looks like a terrible investment. Earnings are negative. Sales are rising, but much more slowly than they were four years ago. The stock trades at an unaffordable valuation of 125 times forward earnings estimates. After a long-forgotten price spike in the pandemic lockdown era, Roku's stock fell hard and then traded sideways over the last three years.
But if you look a bit closer, you should see a healthy long-term growth story in play. Roku targets a huge global market, following in the footsteps of proven winners, and the stock doesn't appear expensive at all from other perspectives.
It's actually one of my favorite stocks to buy in 2025, and Roku should be a helpful addition to long-term portfolios.
NASDAQ: ROKU
Key Data Points
Breaking down common concerns about Roku stock
Let me deconstruct the scary qualities I mentioned above.
Negative earnings
Roku's red-ink earnings are at least partly a voluntary choice. The company treats its streaming hardware as a marketing tool, selling Roku sticks and TV sets below the manufacturing and distribution costs. This user-growth tactic is especially unprofitable in Roku's highest-volume sales periods. The holiday quarter of 2024, for example, nearly quadrupled the devices segment's negative gross margin from 7.6% in the third quarter to 28.6% in the fourth.
In other words, Roku is running its business with unprofitable profit margins to maximize its market reach and user growth. Furthermore, I'm talking about generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP), which is the standard accounting method used for calculating taxes. Roku often posts negative GAAP earnings that result in tax refunds rather than expenses.
At the same time, free cash flows tend to land on the positive side with modest cash profits. That's just efficient accounting powered by stock-based compensation and amortization of Roku's media-streaming content library.
Slowing sales growth
Roku's year-over-year sales growth has averaged 14.7% over the last two years. That's a sharp retreat from 40.9% in the three years before that. But don't forget that the extreme growth was driven by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Lots of people turned to digital media during the lockdown period, resulting in a unique business spike for companies like Roku and Netflix (NFLX +0.16%). The pandemic also happened to take place just months after Walt Disney (DIS +0.87%) launched the Disney+ streaming service, inspiring a torrent of copycat service launches. Long story short, there may never be a media market like the one in 2020-2021 again. Holding on to nearly half of that nitro-boosted growth rate in recent years is actually really good.
Sky-high valuation
Let me point back to the voluntary GAAP losses. Roku isn't trying to generate huge taxable profits at this time, which makes price-to-earnings (P/E) ratios largely unusable. Even the forward-looking version of this common metric relies on Roku's guidance targets filtered through Wall Street's analysis. If anything, the analyst community's projections are more optimistic than Roku's official targets. Management expects a $30 million GAAP loss in fiscal year 2025, which would work out to another "not applicable" P/E ratio.
If you look at other valuation metrics, Roku starts to look like a bargain. Trading at 2.6 times trailing sales, the stock is comparable to slow-growth giants such as Caterpillar or Unilever. Roku also seems undervalued, if you base your analysis on its robust balance sheet, with a price-to-book ratio of 4.4 and a price-to-cash multiple of 4.9.
Image source: Getty Images.
The stock seems stuck
I'll admit that Roku's stalled stock chart can be frustrating. Share prices are down 17% over the last three years, missing out on 44% growth in the S&P 500 (^GSPC +0.26%) market index. Roku's sales are up 45% over this period, while free cash flow rose by 66%. When will the big payoff come, rewarding patient shareholders for Roku's quiet success?
That's OK, though. Keeping stock prices low just gives investors more time to build those Roku positions. I have bought Roku more often than any other stock since the spring of 2022, and I might not be done adding shares yet. Whenever I have spare cash ready for investments, Roku pops up as a top idea. That remains true in June 2025. So, let the chart slouch lower. Affordable buy-in prices can set you up for tremendous long-term returns.
