Cloud storage and content management firm Box Inc. delivered strong fourth-quarter financial results today, beating expectations on earnings and revenue and posting guidance that came in above estimates.

The company reported a profit before certain costs such as stock compensation of 22 cents per share on revenue of $198.9 million, up 8% from a year ago. Wall Street analysts had forecast Box to report earnings of 17 cents per share on revenue of $196.5 million.

For its full fiscal year 2021, Box reported earnings of 70 cents per share on revenue of $770.8 million, up 11% from the previous year.

Box began life back in the 2000s as a provider of simple cloud storage services, but over the years it has expanded into cloud-based business collaboration and content management.

Box Chief Executive Aaron Levie (pictured) said the company had managed to achieve a significantly stronger balance of growth and profitability while executing on its vision to deliver the Box Content Cloud, which is a secure platform for managing content in the cloud throughout its lifecycle.

“Growing demand for products like Shield and Relay continues to accelerate adoption of our bundled Suite offerings,” Levie said.

The company reported that its fourth-quarter billings, an important metric that shows how much revenue it’s expecting to make over a specific period of time, rose 10% over a year ago, to $310.1 million, up 10%. For the full year, billings rose 9%, to $812.5 million.

Box expanded its customer base in the quarter, signing deals with a number of large organizations including Asahi Group Holdings, the Texas Office of the Attorney General, Twilio Inc., Talend SA and the United Parcel Service of America.

Box had a pretty busy quarter on the product front. Most notably, it acquired an e-signature company called SignRequest BV for $55 million and said it will launch a new product in the summer called Box Sign. That will enable Box to compete better with one of its main rivals, Dropbox Inc., in the broader file management market. Box also announced a major update to its content migration service Box Shuttle, aiming to make it easier and faster for enterprises to migrate large amounts of content, together with its permissions and metadata, to the Box Content Cloud.

Constellation Research Inc. analyst Holger Mueller told SiliconANGLE that Box had delivered a good quarter overall, though he indicated that it could perhaps be doing better, noting that its growth seems to have reached “pedestrian levels.”

“But the company has shown good cost control, reducing sales and marketing costs and reducing its overall loss substantially,” Mueller said. “Now all eyes will be on how well Box continues to execute on its content cloud vision of being the one-stop cloud shop for the overall content lifecycle. The future will tell, but it looks promising on the product side.”

For now at least, Box looks to be in good shape as it heads into its fiscal 2022. The company said it’s expecting earnings of 16 to 17 cents per share on revenue of $200 million to $201 million for the next quarter, just above the consensus estimate of 16 cents per share in earnings and $199 million in revenue. For the full year, Box is eyeing revenue of $840 million to $844 million, the midpoint of which is again above Wall Street’s consensus of $840 million.

Photo: JD Lasica/Flickr