Dropbox IPO Offers a Glimpse of Its Business Success

Dropbox's IPO offered a glimpse into its financial success, with the company reporting $1.11 billion in revenue for 2017.

The IPO filing revealed that Dropbox's revenue had grown by 44% year-over-year, demonstrating its strong growth potential.

This growth was driven by the company's 500 million registered users, who collectively stored over 35 billion files on the platform.

Dropbox's net loss narrowed to $321 million in 2017, down from $457 million in 2016.

Additional reading: Dropbox Ipo Date

Dropbox is aiming to list on the stock market during the first half of 2018. This could make it one of the largest US tech IPOs in several years.

The company has reportedly filed confidentially for a US initial public offering, with Goldman Sachs Group and JPMorgan Chase set to lead the potential listing.

Dropbox boasts annual revenues of around $1bn, and has reportedly been profitable, excluding interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation. This is a significant difference from other recent tech IPOs like Snap, which listed despite losing money.

The company has 500m users, including 200,000 businesses. This is a big player in the cloud storage market, and will have to prove to potential investors how its offering is different to those of Google, Microsoft and other rivals.

Dropbox has spent hundreds of millions on developing its own data centres and cloud storage. This has enabled it to speed up file transfers while also reducing costs.

The company's last valuation was in 2014, when it was valued at $10bn. It's not clear whether the IPO would take place at the same price.

Dropbox has over 500 million registered users, with 11 million paying customers.

The company's revenue increased by more than 30% last year, reaching $1.1 billion.

Dropbox's net losses shrank to $112 million from $210 million in the same period.

The company plans to list on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the symbol DBX.

Goldman Sachs Group Inc., JPMorgan Chase & Co., Deutsche Bank, and Allen & Co. are leading the offering.

Dropbox is the next in a long line of tech companies to rise from private funding to a massive IPO after just a few years of rapid growth.

This IPO will be the largest tech company IPO since Snapchat's owner, Snap Inc, went public last year. Snapchat's user growth and capture rate among millennials were major factors in the optimism surrounding its IPO. However, concerns about profitability and user growth caused its stock price to sink and stagnate below the IPO price for the rest of 2017.

The Box IPO in 2015 is a more relevant example of what Dropbox might face. Box briefly commanded a $23/share price before plummeting to less than half that in the following 12 months. It took Box over a year to slowly creep back up, although it's worth noting that the tech market as a whole did very well in 2017 and Box didn't outpace the industry.

Dropbox's CEO, Drew Houston, has stated that the company's market opportunity has grown as it expands from keeping files in sync to keeping teams in sync. This shift in focus from consumer to business storage products is a significant change for Dropbox.

Additional reading: Dropbox or Box Net

Dropbox's financials are about to get a lot more transparent. The company has yet to turn a profit and has lost around $1 billion so far.

We'll get our first real look at Dropbox's earnings after its first quarter of business. Details were limited in the S-1 filing, but we'll have a better understanding of the company's financials then.

Dropbox increased revenue in 2017 by 31% to a total of $1.1 billion.