UPDATED 20:33 EDT / NOVEMBER 08 2018

CLOUD

Dropbox sees shares rise again as it beats earnings expectations

Enterprise file-sharing company Dropbox Inc. beat earnings and guidance expectations when it reported its third-quarter results today, boosting its stock price by 8 percent in after-hours trading.

The company, which provides cloud-based file sharing and collaboration tools, had seen its share price take a beating in the previous quarter, falling more than 10 percent on the news that its Chief Operating Officer Dennis Woodside would be leaving without being replaced.

But it was all smiles today as Dropbox smashed Wall Street’s expectations on earnings and revenue. The company reported income before certain costs such as stock compensation of $45 million, or 11 cents per share. Revenue came to $360.3 million, up 26 percent from a year ago.

By comparison, Wall Street was expecting earnings of just 6 cents per share on revenue of $352.57 million.

Dropbox had further good news for shareholders when it updated its guidance for the current quarter. The company said it’s expecting fourth-quarter revenue of $367 million to $370 million, well ahead of Wall Street’s estimated $363.7 million.

Dropbox also raised its full-year guidance from a range of $1.36 billion to $1.37 billion, to $1.38 billion to $1.39 billion. Analysts had previously pegged its full-year earnings at $1.37 billion.

“We delivered another quarter of strong execution in Q3, driving healthy top-line growth and expanding free cash flow margins,” Dropbox Chief Executive Drew Houston (pictured) said in a statement.

Dropbox continues to do well on the customer acquisition front too. It said it now counts 12.3 million paying customers, up from 11.9 million in the preceding quarter. Chief Financial Officer Ajay Vashee said in a conference call that this growth was largely being driven by conversions to its individual and team plans. He added that each customer is also worth more, with average revenue per customer growing to $118.60, up from $112.05 a year ago.

“Our strategy going forward will be to continue to drive revenue growth through a combination of paying user conversion and ARPU (average revenue per user) expansion,” Vashee said in the call.

Executives also spoke of the company’s most recent product enhancements, noting the launch of an updated search engine called Nautilus that leverages machine learning.

In addition, the company announced a new partnership with Google Cloud Identity in the hours before it posted its results. The collaboration will see Dropbox integrated Google’s Cloud Identity service with its platform in order to manage access to Dropbox Business accounts as employees join, move or leave an organization. Users can also access their Dropbox accounts with their Google login credentials and multifactor authentication.

Photo: Dropbox

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