Online Storage Provider Box Prices I.P.O. at $14 a Share

http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2015/01/22/online-storage-provider-box-prices-i-p-o-at-14-a-share/

by louhong • 12 years ago

40 25 12 years ago

dealbook.nytimes.com

mikeyouse• 12 years ago

There isn't much content in the article worth getting around the WSJ Paywall;

    Online-storage company Box Inc. priced its initial public offering at
    $14 apiece late Thursday, above expectations, according to a person
    familiar with the offering.

    The deal raised $175 million by selling 12.5 million shares, according
    to the person. The company had been looking to sell 12.5 million shares
    in the range of $11 to $13 a share, according to a regulatory filing.

    Box’s IPO comes roughly 10 months after it publicly filed for an IPO.
    Those plans were postponed amid a drop in demand for technology
    stocks, and in the ensuing months it turned to the private market to
    raise additional funding.

    Box plans to start trading Friday on the New York Stock Exchange
    under the ticker “BOX”.

    The deal is being led by Morgan Stanley, Credit Suisse
    and J.P. Morgan.

(Hope it's okay to Mirror here)

rokhayakebe• 12 years ago

Sometimes I wished all articles were written as:

Facts: Box, online storage co, CEO A. Levy, IPO set for xx/xx/20xx, previously raised $175M in x rounds, looking to raise $175M at PO, shares priced at $14, Underwriter is JPM.

Opinion: Blah Blah Blah

sukilot• 12 years ago

That's what crunchbase is for.

nzealand• 12 years ago

This has some pretty graphs of the financials...

https://gigaom.com/2015/01/21/box-ipo-what-a-long-strange-tr...

loosescrews2• 12 years ago

Who actually uses Box? Does anyone here use their service? Do they have some submarket cornered?

Most of what I hear about them is related to their IPO or recruitment.

somethingnew• 12 years ago

My university uses them for file storage and sharing, so I imagine they have many large enterprise clients.

spike0213• 12 years ago

I don't know that they have a submarket cornered per se, but my university seems to be using them exclusively for the online class system (log in / download lecture files, etc).

On my own I've been using them for about 5 years, give or take. I use it over Dropbox a majority of the time. I personally like Box. I think it works well enough and it has a desktop syncing client for regular customers now. Used to be exclusive to business customers IIRC, so that was one of the things people didn't like.

loosescrews2• 12 years ago

What does Box do better than its competitors?

Their small file size limit and lack of a Linux client have prevented me from using their service.

tmuir• 12 years ago

What features does Box have that Dropbox doesnt? I realize that as a nonpaying user, I'm definitely not in the target market, but are there killer apps besides the normal usecases of a synced folder on all of your devices and sharing links to those files?

TheBiv• 12 years ago

Their 'submarket' is Enterprise.

Their s-1 stated that they have 48% of all Fortune 500 companies as clients and ~44k paying clients total. No idea the seat count or per company revenue.

salemh3• 12 years ago

Yup, they do "big" integration well.

The actual system is inferior UI wise (personal opinion) compared to DropBox.

Sync is worse then DropBox [edit: meant, better then] Google Drive (I find Drive worse then DropBox).

As far as reliability, its top notch, but I can't state anything on DropBox/Drive except that Drive has screwed up version control at a prior company.

Second biggest failing: Its own "collab" format is horrible (think google docs, etc.). Very poorly done.

Its biggest failing: No tree view. You can't "expand" folders.

That is ludicrous and makes it extremely hard to navigate. We'll have VP's joke about how they gave up on finding stuff, and just email a group to find X / Y doc / presentation, etc.

Its permissions need work, but overall decent.

Summary: as far as Enterprise level software? It does pretty well, and far less buggy then most things that get plugged into AMS (asset management), Content management, Project Management (several) systems.

msoad• 12 years ago

We used to pay for bot Box and Google Apps. Our IT department ditched Box in favor of Google Drive. We are a enterprise company.

ritchiea• 12 years ago

I have an acquaintance who works there and their clients are all really big companies like Pepsi. And from my impression it's not technical departments that tend to purchase their services which is why you asking yourself "who uses this?". One of the things you seem to buy with Box is a lot of hand holding and simple technical assistance.

pbreit• 12 years ago

It's not consumer like DropBox. And not only is it enterprise but it is frequently behind the scenes. So for example if you wanted to create an app that had storage needs beyond a simple repository like S3.

kondro• 12 years ago

Definitely Enterprise. Box has pretty fine-grained permission/sharing management, including when/how these shares expire (as an example).

7Figures2Commas• 12 years ago

The NYT[1] has some important context missing in the WSJ summary:

At that price, the company will still be valued at $1.7 billion, but it is well below the $2.4 billion valuation sold to investors in a financing round last summer.

The float looks small though, so there's hope for last round's muppets.

[1] http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2015/01/22/online-storage-provid...

bradb3030• 12 years ago

Good post. I don't understand why they focused on share price. Companies routinely do reverse share splits pre-IPO to make the total number of shares what they need to be for the valuation divided by shares to equal $12-18. That point seems to be just a magical desired range for SaaS IPO's. Someone smarter than I may know the reason, but I think they could have hit nearly any share price they wanted to.

dang• 12 years ago

Thanks, we'll change the url to that from http://www.wsj.com/articles/box-inc-ipo-prices-at-14-a-share....

bruceb• 12 years ago

More on the delay from announcing their intention to IPO to actually getting there. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8932932

Online Storage Provider Box Prices I.P.O. at $14 a Share

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