Box Inc.’s share price took a tumble in the hours after it reported its latest quarterly financials, despite beating Wall Street’s projections on both revenue and profit.

The company, which provides cloud-based content management services, reported a fiscal first-quarter loss after certain costs such as stock compensation of 7 cents per share. Wall Street was expecting a loss of 8 cents per share. As for revenue, Box brought in $140.5 million for the quarter, up 20 percent year-over-year, just over the $139.7 million Wall Street was looking for.

Box also reported billings of $116.7 million, up 17 percent from a year ago, and free cash flow of $7.3 million.

Not least, the firm beat expectations on its guidance for the current quarter. It’s expecting an adjusted loss of 5 to 6 cents per share on revenue of $146 million to $147 million. Wall Street said it was expecting second quarter revenue of $146.1 million.

But the positive results weren’t enough for investors who’d been hoping for more. The company’s share price fell more than 4.5 percent in after-hours trading.

Box Chief Executive Officer Aaron Levie (pictured) spoke of the company’s progress in the quarter, pointing to strong attach rates for its newest products, an expanded international customer base and more product innovation and security. “Our focus on security and collaboration, as well as our vision for artificial intelligence, continues to resonate,” he said.

Levie elaborated on his vision for AI in an interview with SiliconANGLE last month, saying he believes the technology could be used in Box’s products to automate underlying business workflows and help workers to quickly find the information they need.

“All of that work, that is really just us interacting with computers to try to find information and do something with it,” Levie said. “We think machine learning is the only real way to do that at scale.”

AI is something that might one day help Box to achieve what it calls higher product “attach rates,” which is jargon for secondary sales to customers after the sale of its primary products. By doing this, the company can expand its penetration inside very large corporations, Box Chief Financial Officer Dylan Smith told analysts on a conference call.

Box will certainly need to do something eventually, as it remains unprofitable overall. The company reported a net operating loss of $35.9 million for the latest quarter.

Nonetheless, Alan Lepofsky, principal analyst and vice president of Constellation Research Inc., described Box’s performance this quarter as “impressive,” considering it managed to grow both revenue and customers during a period when rival firm Dropbox Inc. launched its initial public offering and when Microsoft Corp. has been doubling down on its OneDrive file storage offering.

“Box continues to expand the architecture elements of its platform, such as data residency, compliance, security and administration,” Lepofsky said.

Box also pointed out that it’s now serving more than 85,000 enterprises and organizations, including new or expanded relationships with the Pentagon’s research unit DARPA, the City of Philadelphia, Hitachi Corp. and Mitsubishi Motors Corp.

Photo: JD Lasica/Flickr