Investors looking for a way to diversify their investment portfolios with some tech stocks will have a rare chance to do so later this week. Dropbox, the San Francisco-based file hosting and syncing service, will have its initial public offering (IPO) on Friday giving investors the opportunity to own shares of the popular tech firm valued at $10 billion.
A decade after its founding, the company finally decided to go public. Based on documents submitted to the SEC, Dropbox plans to raise $500 million in this offering. The company will be traded on Nasdaq under the “DBX” symbol.
Thanks to its filing, important data from the company’s books is now available to the public. For instance, its revenue for 2017 was revealed to be $1.11 billion, a massive 31 percent increase from 2016’s figure. In addition, the tech company has about 500 million registered users representing an increase of 100 million users compared to the number it had at the start of 2017.
File-sharing firm Dropbox files for U.S. IPO https://t.co/WQhvcDlR3l pic.twitter.com/njz6jHBxiR
— Bloomberg TV (@BloombergTV) February 23, 2018
Of the 500 million registered users, 11 million of these are paying subscribers. The average annual revenue from each paying user is $111.91.
Despite its revenue growth from the previous year, the filing also shows that Dropbox actually experienced a net loss of $111.7 million in 2017. However, this is a significant improvement from 2016’s net loss of $210.2 million. The loss was mainly driven by its high R&D budget but the company is optimistic about its future earnings potential and has highlighted the fact it already became free-cash-flow positive in 2016. In addition, it does not rely on enterprise sales teams to shore up its revenue and noted that most of its earnings came from users directly purchasing their subscriptions.
Dropbox was founded in 2007 by MIT students Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi. After it rolled out its services to the public the next year, it quickly grew in popularity due to the simplicity of its file syncing.
[Featured image via DropBox]