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Dropbox Inc. is flying high today, its stock up more than 22% in trading despite a swoon in overall markets Friday after the cloud storage company reported financial results that beat Wall Street’s expectations.

The company reported a profit before certain costs such as stock compensation of 16 cents per share on revenue of $446 million, up 19% from a year ago. Wall Street was looking for a 14-cent profit on revenue of $443.41 million.

That wasn’t the only thing that put a smile on investors’ faces, though, as the company also reported it had 14.3 million paying customers at the end of the quarter, up from 12.7 million one year before. Dropbox said its average revenue per paying user also rose, to $125, from $119.61 per paying user a year ago.

Annual recurring revenue, a common measure for cloud software firms, also rose 19% from a year ago, to $1.82 billion.

The only blip on the landscape was Dropbox’s deferred revenue, which came to $554.2 million at the end of the quarter, below the $555.6 million estimate.

For the full year, Dropbox reported a profit of 50 cents per share on total revenue of $1.661 billion, up 19% from a year ago.

“Our strong Q4 marked the end of an exciting year for Dropbox as we launched our vision for the smart workspace,” Dropbox co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Drew Houston (pictured) said in a statement. “We closed the year with more than $1.6 billion in revenue, over 450,000 Dropbox business teams, and millions of people using our new foreground app that keeps Dropbox at the center of our users’ workflows.”

Houston added in a conference call that the company is now looking to become profitable by the end of the year.

That itself is a pretty major development as it shows that Dropbox’s executives understand what the shareholders of a quickly-maturing software company are always looking for, said Holger Mueller of Constellation Research Inc.

“All eyes will be on Dropbox to see if it can execute this,” the analyst said.

If Dropbox is going to do that, it will need a good start to the year, and the company’s first-quarter guidance suggests that’s going to happen. The company forecast quarterly revenue of $452 million to $454 million, above the average analyst forecast of $448.4 million.

The company also said that its board of directors has authorized the repurchase of up to $600 million of its Class A shares.

The planned share buyback is a “sound move” that likely helped boost investor’s optimism, along with the promise of finally becoming profitable later this year, said analyst Charles King of Pund-IT Inc.

Photo: WSJ Conference and Meeting Photos/Flickr