According to Bloomberg, Box, the popular provider of cloud storage and digital content management services, has its eyes on an initial public offering in 2014. The company, according to its CEO Aaron Levie, has to go public, as it doesn’t wish to sell itself to another firm.
Box, despite competing in a crowded market space, has grown to be a business of great scale. The company claims to have 140,000 business customers, which pay, according to its pricing chart, $15 per user per month. This places the firms revenues, in all likelyhood, above the 8 figure mark.
The company is perhaps not profitable at the current moment, with Bloomberg quoting Levie as indicating that the firm is investing this year to fuel growth: “2013 is a long shot,” he said, despite having had plans for an IPO this year; 2014 is the new target.
In the eyes of Levie, Box is “well-suited” to be a public firm. TNW understands this to mean that as a company, its business model revolves around recurring subscription payments from business and enterprise clients, providing it with stable revenues that investors prefer.
It is impossible to mention the potential IPO of a technology firm and not bring up the relatively unimpressive recent performance of major flotations including those of Facebook, Zynga, and Groupon, each of which have dropped from their IPO price to varying degrees. Still, properly priced, Box could buck the trend, and show off corporate maturity that some of its sector peers lacked at key moments.
In the next year, Box intends on staffing up to 1,000 total employees, about one third more than it has now.
Box’s offerings are not simple cloud storage. Still, substitute products, competitors, and upstarts abound to threaten its growth; when the company files its paper to go public, we’ll have a better look at how effectively the firm has managed to find steady, and quick growth.
Top Image Credit: Emmanuel Huybrechts
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