Box posted better-than-expected revenue and profits for its fiscal first quarter ended April 30, but slightly reduced full-year guidance, which the cloud-based content-storage company said reflected higher-than-expected headwinds from foreign currency translation.
The stock was 5% higher in late trading, to $29.43.
For the quarter,
Box
(ticker: BOX) reported revenue of $252 million, up 6% from a year earlier, and above the company’s guidance range of $248 million to $250 million. Adjusted profits were 32 cents a share, above the guidance range of 26 to 27 cents. Under generally accepted accounting principles, the company earned 2 cents a share. The company said results were reduced about 5 cents a share by unfavorable forex rates, in particular against the Japanese yen.
In an interview with Barron’s, CEO Aaron Levie noted that the company has bigger exposure than most other cloud-based computing companies to Japan—he notes that the current exchange rate with the yen is about 3% worse than at the last earnings report.
Levie said the macro landscape remains difficult, with companies still cautious on technology spending, although he adds that there are some new pockets of weakness, in particular around small businesses and the European market. But the company nevertheless beat expectations.
For the July quarter, Box sees revenue of $260 million to $262 million, up 7% at the top end of the range, at the midpoint slightly above the Street consensus at $260 million. The company sees non-GAAP profits of 34 to 35 cents a share, just ahead of the Street at 33 cents.
For the full year ending in January, Box now sees revenue of $1.045 billion to $1.055 billion, down a hair from the previous forecast of $1.5 billion to $1.6 billion, largely reflecting the depreciation of the yen against the dollar over the past year. Box now sees full-year adjusted profits of $1.44 to $1.50 a share, up from a previous range of $1.42 to $1.48 a share.
Levie sounded an optimistic tone about the outlook for Box AI, a recently introduced new tool to search across documents stored in Box. “We think we have one of the most ideal use cases for AI,” Levie says, “using large language models to bring intelligence to your enterprise data.”
Levie says that with the new tool “you can go into any document in Box, and ask questions of the data…you can take the power of data and make sense of it and make of use it, turning it into real business data.”
Write to Eric J. Savitz at [email protected]
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