How Will Dropbox Position In Collaboration?

Earlier this year, Billion Dollar Unicorn Dropbox (Nasdaq: DBX) finally went public. The company was expected to list last year, but the disappointing IPO performance for the technology industry resulted in a delay. It is still early days, but the company appears to have had a turbulent start.

Dropbox’s Financials

Dropbox recently reported its first quarter results since it went public. Revenues grew an impressive 28% to $316.3 million. The market was looking for revenues of $309 million. It ended the quarter with adjusted earnings of $0.08 per share, compared with the Street’s forecast of $0.04 per share.

Among operating metrics, paying users grew from 9.3 million a year ago to 11.5 million at the end of the quarter. Average revenue per paying user also grew from $110.79 to $114.30.

Dropbox expects to end the current quarter with revenues of $328-$331 million. It forecast the year’s revenues at $1.34-$1.36 billion. For the current quarter, the market pegged Dropbox’s revenues at $325 million with adjusted earnings of $0.04 a share. They expect the company to report revenues of $1.35 billion for the year.

Till recently, Dropbox was venture funded. It had raised $1.7 billion from venture investors and through long-term debts. Its investors include JPMorgan, BlackRock, Innovation Department, QueensBridge Venture Partners, Salesforce Ventures, T. Rowe Price, Index Ventures, Accel Partners, AFSquare, Benchmark, Glynn Capital Management, Goldman Sachs, Greylock Partners, Institutional Venture Partners, RIT Capital Partners, Sequoia Capital, SV Angel, Valiant Capital Partners, Ali Partovi, Amidzad Partners, Bobby Yazdani, Hadi Partovi, Pejman Nozad, Signatures Capital, and Y Combinator. Earlier this year, it raised $777 million at a valuation of $7.1 billion in an IPO. The valuation at the time is well below the $10 billion that it was valued at back in 2014.

Dropbox’s Diversifying Offering

Dropbox may have started out as a cloud storage service provider. But over the past year, it has been diversifying its presence into the content collaboration market. According to IDC, the global content collaboration market is estimated to be a $50 billion market opportunity. As part of this expansion, last year, the company launched Dropbox Paper. Dropbox Paper is a collaborative workspace solution that allows users to work in real-time with their teams. Users can create content, edit it and add media as part of the service. Paper is available for free for users who already have a Dropbox account. It recently rolled out several updates to Paper, including a redesigned mobile app and a revamped mobile editor that will simplify editing, discovery and overall use for the mobile users. The mobile app will also facilitate task creation, including assigning duties and setting due dates.

Dropbox also continued to build onto its partner network. Late last year, it announced a strategic tie-up with Salesforce.com. As part of the agreement, the two companies will work together to collaborate and connect customers better across sales, service and marketing channels. Dropbox will integrate with Salesforce’s commerce cloud and marketing cloud and allow users to create branded customized Dropbox folders that can be accessed by both internal teams and external partners. It will also users to access Dropbox content directly within Quip and provide support for Quip documents. Last year, Dropbox had entered into similar agreements with G Suite and Adobe Creative Cloud as well.

Questions for Drobpox’s Board

Dropbox may have outpaced market expectations in the quarter, but the revenue growth is slowing down. Competition from the likes of Google and Adobe have made it difficult for the company to sustain earlier growth levels, resulting in a 4% drop in after-hours trading – despite the results. I would like to know what other cards does Dropbox have up its sleeve to beat daunting competition. With collaboration identified as its focus area, is it looking to acquire other smaller players to create a differentiated offering?

In March this year, Dropbox completed its IPO when it sold 26.8 million shared at $21 per share. It is currently trading at $30.83 at a market capitalization of $12.29 billion. The stock had climbed to $34.83 within a few weeks of listing. It has also seen a low of $27.75 so far, but for the moment, is holding steady in the $30-32 range.

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?Photo credit: Ian Lamont/Flickr.com.