Dropbox Inc. announced its first ever net profit, in a period when Cloud computing demand was driven by a change to work from home.
Dropbox recorded first quarter results of $39.3 million, or 9 cents per share, the San Francisco-headquartered file hosting service company disclosed on Thursday in a statement.
On average, market observers had estimated 3 cents net loss and $452.2 million in earnings. According to data collected by Bloomberg, Dropbox has surpassed the forecasts of analysts for revenue and income every quarter since it went public in March 2018.
Ajay Vashee, Dropbox finance executive, disclosed during a conference meeting with analysts that the company projects a profit for the full year.
Dropbox stated that quarantines during the coronavirus crisis and encouraging telecommuting will help the company, even as the lockdowns are lifted.
For the first time, a large percentage of the world is pushed into a remote state of life and work, Vashee said. "I think the implications of that will continue far past when we usually go back to the workplace," Dropbox chief executive officer Drew Houston stated.
The achievement marks Dropbox's years of work to cut costs and attract paid users for its program, which enables people to synchronize and exchange files over the internet.
As coronavirus-related lockdowns forced employees to operate from home, demand for Dropbox services also got a big boost, creating a greater need for Cloud computing to help staff communicate and transfer files between office and home computer.
At the end of the first quarter the company has reported 14.6 million paying users, in line with the expectations of Wall Street analysts and up from 14.3 million just a quarter ago.
The number of weekly active users of the updated mobile app from Dropbox has risen by about 60 per cent since March this year, the company said on Thursday in a blog post.
As for guidance, Dropbox projects second-quarter sales of $463 million to $466 million. For the second quarter, analysts surveyed by Refinitiv had predicted revenues of $476.1.
For all of 2020 Dropbox is now seeing sales from $1.88 billion to $1.90 billion, slightly ahead of $1.88 billion by consensus analyst projections.
Daily Dropbox Business team trials have increased by 40 percent since mid-March, and trial starts have increased by over 25 percent for its individual program.
In addition, early adoption of the latest Dropbox mobile app has expanded to more than 350,000 of its more than 450,000 Dropbox business teams, with weekly collaborative users growing by 60 percent.
