Box Beats Estimates With $78.7M In FQ3 Revenue, Boosts Full-Year Guidance, Shares Fall 4% — Update: Shares Now Up!

Update: Shares in Box are now up a fraction in after-hours trading. Investors are such fickle things. 

Box, an enterprise collaboration and file management shop, reported its fiscal third quarter financial results today. The company lost $0.31 per share, using adjusted metrics, on revenue of $78.7 million.

Analysts had expected a $0.31 per-share loss, again using adjusted metrics, off $76.76 million in top line. Its shares up several points in regular trading, Box is down around 4 percent following its earnings beat as of the time of writing.

Numbers

Compared to the year-ago quarter, Box’s revenues grew by 38 percent. Using normal cost metrics, Box lost a stiffer $0.45 per share during the quarter.

The company’s cash burn, and cash position are always notable. Here’s the full whack:

Net cash used in operating activities in the third quarter of fiscal 2016 totaled $17.3 million, compared to $21.7 million in the second quarter of fiscal 2016 and $19.6 million in the third quarter of fiscal 2015.

Cash, cash equivalents, marketable securities, and restricted cash were $244.0 million as of October 31, 2015, of which $29.1 million was restricted.

Box has previously stated that it does not anticipate a need to attract additional capital as it works towards profitability.

In its financial report, Box indicated that it expects top line of $81 to $82 million in its fiscal fourth quarter. Investors had, before the report, anticipated $80.82 million in revenue for the current period. The company also modestly raised its expected full fiscal year guidance to $299 million to $300 million, up, from $295 million, to $297 million.

Box also expects its non-GAAP operating margin to land at negative 46 percent in its current fiscal year, again a modest improvement on prior guidance.

What All That Means

Box did better than the street expected, beating on revenue, and meeting on profits. The company guided roughly in-line for the last quarter of its fiscal year, and also inched its guidance north for the full year. To see its shares fall as have at least initially, even if the swing is hardly fatal, seems to imply that the company remains in the woods when it comes to investor sentiment.

As a corporation, Box is often viewed as a bellwether of sorts. Its travails to IPO have been largely set aside now that it is a public firm. At the same time, the high burn, high growth model is perhaps less popular among investing classes than it was.

Still, as per the last few quarters, Box is doing precisely what it said it would do. Hard to get mad about that.