Bloomberg sources claimed last month that Dropbox was quietly working to become a public company. There were also some interesting hires last year that gave indication that the company was heading on this route. A few years ago, Dropbox was valued at $10 billion, so it will be interesting to see how things turn out for the company, or if it will see the same fate that Snap did.
Today, Dropbox’s IPO filing surfaced. While we don’t know when the stock will hit the market for trading, the documentation gives us some interesting insight to how the company’s situation looks as it plans to go public.
BREAKING: Dropbox files for IPO. https://t.co/jn8limUSe7
— CNBC Now (@CNBCnow) February 23, 2018
From the filing itself, we learned that Dropbox has over 500 million registered users on its platform, but only 11 million of those users are paying subscribers. One can guess that the 500 million count might be a bit saturated seeing as users can sign up for multiple accounts, so the unique user count could be significantly lower. In the documentation, the company admit that “a majority of our registered users may never convert to a paid subscription to our platform.”
Being able to covert existing users to the paid tier is on the top of Dropbox’s list, but according to the filing, it appears that the revenue growth rate has declined and could continue to slide. Per filing, the company ended 2017 with a $1 billion deficit. It’s rate of net losses has decreased from nearly $326 million in 2015 to almost $112 in 2017. The filing summaries: “We have a history of net losses, we anticipate increasing expenses in the future, and we may not be able to achieve or maintain profitability.”
