Sluggish market takes toll on Box IPO
The long anticipated Box IPO will remain anticipated a bit longer. When the cloud storage and file share company filed its IPO paperwork on March 24, the offering could have been on for early this month, but now it looks like it won’t happen till at least June, the Wall Street Journal reported late Wednesday (registration required).
Box would not comment, A Box spokesman said the IPO never had a date set in stone. “ Since filing, we’ve planned on going when it makes the most sense for the market. That plan hasn’t changed,” he said via email. And on that note, i t’s easy to see why this is not a great time for an IPO. As the Journal reported, in the past two months, the Bessemer Venture Partners index of 37 public cloud companies has lost $58 billion in market value.
According to Box’s S-1 filing:
“For the 12 months ended December 31, 2011, January 31, 2013 and 2014, our revenue was $21.1 million, $58.8 million and $124.2 million, respectively, representing year-over-year growth of 179% and 111%, and our net losses were $50.3 million, $112.6 million and $168.6 million, respectively.”
The big issue is that the market, which had been forgiving of fast-growing-but-money-losing cloud companies may be changing. Meanwhile, rumors of companies — from Dropbox to Microsoft — swooping in to buy Box have been swirling on social networks.
This report was updated at 9:08 a.m. PST with Box comment.
Related research and analysis from Gigaom Research:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.
More From paidContent.org