Online Storage Provider Box Prices I.P.O. at $14 a Share

[mikeyouse]

There isn't much content in the article worth getting around the WSJ Paywall;

    Online-storage company Box Inc. priced its initial public offering at
    $14 apiece late Thursday, above expectations, according to a person
    familiar with the offering.

    The deal raised $175 million by selling 12.5 million shares, according
    to the person. The company had been looking to sell 12.5 million shares
    in the range of $11 to $13 a share, according to a regulatory filing.

    Box’s IPO comes roughly 10 months after it publicly filed for an IPO.
    Those plans were postponed amid a drop in demand for technology
    stocks, and in the ensuing months it turned to the private market to
    raise additional funding.

    Box plans to start trading Friday on the New York Stock Exchange
    under the ticker “BOX”.

    The deal is being led by Morgan Stanley, Credit Suisse
    and J.P. Morgan.

(Hope it's okay to Mirror here)

[rokhayakebe]

Sometimes I wished all articles were written as:

Facts: Box, online storage co, CEO A. Levy, IPO set for xx/xx/20xx, previously raised $175M in x rounds, looking to raise $175M at PO, shares priced at $14, Underwriter is JPM.

Opinion: Blah Blah Blah

[nzealand]

This has some pretty graphs of the financials...

https://gigaom.com/2015/01/21/box-ipo-what-a-long-strange-tr...

[7Figures2Commas]

The NYT[1] has some important context missing in the WSJ summary:

> At that price, the company will still be valued at $1.7 billion, but it is well below the $2.4 billion valuation sold to investors in a financing round last summer.

The float looks small though, so there's hope for last round's muppets.

[1] http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2015/01/22/online-storage-provid...

[bradb3030]

Good post. I don't understand why they focused on share price. Companies routinely do reverse share splits pre-IPO to make the total number of shares what they need to be for the valuation divided by shares to equal $12-18. That point seems to be just a magical desired range for SaaS IPO's. Someone smarter than I may know the reason, but I think they could have hit nearly any share price they wanted to.

[dang]

Thanks, we'll change the url to that from http://www.wsj.com/articles/box-inc-ipo-prices-at-14-a-share....

[bruceb]

More on the delay from announcing their intention to IPO to actually getting there. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8932932

[loosescrews]

Who actually uses Box? Does anyone here use their service? Do they have some submarket cornered?

Most of what I hear about them is related to their IPO or recruitment.

[TheBiv]

Their 'submarket' is Enterprise.

Their s-1 stated that they have 48% of all Fortune 500 companies as clients and ~44k paying clients total. No idea the seat count or per company revenue.

[spike021]

I don't know that they have a submarket cornered per se, but my university seems to be using them exclusively for the online class system (log in / download lecture files, etc).

On my own I've been using them for about 5 years, give or take. I use it over Dropbox a majority of the time. I personally like Box. I think it works well enough and it has a desktop syncing client for regular customers now. Used to be exclusive to business customers IIRC, so that was one of the things people didn't like.

[pbreit]

It's not consumer like DropBox. And not only is it enterprise but it is frequently behind the scenes. So for example if you wanted to create an app that had storage needs beyond a simple repository like S3.

[kondro]

Definitely Enterprise. Box has pretty fine-grained permission/sharing management, including when/how these shares expire (as an example).

[ritchiea]

I have an acquaintance who works there and their clients are all really big companies like Pepsi. And from my impression it's not technical departments that tend to purchase their services which is why you asking yourself "who uses this?". One of the things you seem to buy with Box is a lot of hand holding and simple technical assistance.

[msoad]

We used to pay for bot Box and Google Apps. Our IT department ditched Box in favor of Google Drive. We are a enterprise company.

[somethingnew]

My university uses them for file storage and sharing, so I imagine they have many large enterprise clients.