Dropbox shares jumped in extended trading Thursday after the cloud storage company beat quarterly earnings estimates, fueled by continued subscriber growth.
For the fourth quarter, Dropbox earned an adjusted $0.16 per share as revenue rose 19% to $446 billion. Analysts had expected earnings of 14 cents per share on revenue of $443 million.
Paying users increased to 14.3 million from 14 million in the previous quarter, with average revenue per user rising 1.5% to $125.00. Wall Street estimates were for 14.2 million subscribers and $123.81 in average revenue per user.
“Our strong Q4 marked the end of an exciting year for Dropbox as we launched our vision for the smart workspace,” Dropbox CEO Drew Houston said in a news release. “We closed the year with more than $1.6 billion in [annual] revenue, over 450,000 Dropbox business teams, and millions of people using our new foreground app that keeps Dropbox at the center of our users’ workflows.”
In the after-hours session, Dropbox shares climbed as much as 13.4% to $21.23 before finishing at $20.73, up 10.8%.
After Dropbox went public in March 2018, the stock surged well above the IPO price of $21, reaching $39.60 in June 2018. But it had been in a downward spiral since then, going as low as $16.80 in December.
Thursday’s jump took the stock above $21 for the first time since September.
“Of late, Dropbox has been facing competition from free cloud storage providers like Microsoft and Google,” AlphaStreet reported. “However, the company’s aggressive portfolio revamp and introduction of new features give it an edge over rivals.”
According to one recent study, the cloud storage market is expected to grow from $30.70 billion in 2017 to $88.91 billion by 2022.
Dropbox’s goal is to be profitable by the end of the year, Houston told analysts in an earnings call. On an unadjusted basis, the company posted a net loss of $6.6 million for the fourth quarter, down from $9.,9.5 million a year ago, and a net loss of $52.7 million for the full year.