Box revenues grow 26%, despite shareholder worry

Box's third quarter financial results show revenue increases of 26%, reaching $129.3 million (96 million), which marginally beat industry estimates of $128.64 million (95 million).

Overall, its losses were higher than the same quarter of 2016 as it invested more money in marketing to compete with other cloud storage services such as Dropbox.

This led to the company's shares dropping by 8.5% as investors expressed concerns it would lose its cash flow positive status. However, values started to rise again shortly after the decrease.

On a more positive note, its user base grew to 80,000 businesses, including some high profile firms such as LionsGate, Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the US Food and Drug Administration.

Next year, the company wants to put more focus on innovation following the successful launch of Box Skills, Box using Azure and Box Relay, Box's co-founder and CEO Aaron Levie said in response to the results.

"In Q3, we continued to extend our lead in cloud content management by innovating on our core products and by unveiling new capabilities like Box Skills and Box Graph that will help enterprises bring AI and machine learning to their content in Box," he said.

"By making Box the most intelligent and secure cloud content management platform, we are becoming more and more critical to powering our customers as they modernize their businesses and drive digital transformation."

However, to reach Box's goal of $506 million (374 million) in revenues next year, this will also come with some cost-cutting, the company's co-founder and CFO, Dylan Smith added.

"We are driving operational efficiencies across our business as evidenced by a year-over-year improvement of $21 million in our cash flow from operations to $14 million," he explained, "With our ability to balance innovation, growth and profitability, we are well-positioned to achieve our $1 billion revenue target in the coming years."