Risks Affecting Us
Our business is subject to numerous risks and uncertainties, including those highlighted in the section titled “Risk Factors” immediately following this prospectus summary. These risks include, but are not limited to, the following:
• We have a history of cumulative losses, and we do not expect to be profitable for the foreseeable future;
• We have a limited operating history, which makes it difficult to predict our future operating results;
• The market in which we participate is intensely competitive, and if we do not compete effectively, our operating results could be harmed;
• If the cloud-based Enterprise Content Collaboration market develops more slowly than we expect or declines, our business could be adversely affected;
• We have experienced rapid growth in recent periods. If we fail to manage our growth effectively, we may be unable to execute our business plan, maintain high levels of service or adequately address competitive challenges;
• Our business depends substantially on customers renewing their subscriptions with us and expanding their use of our services. Any decline in our customer renewals or failure to convince our customers to broaden their use of our services would harm our future operating results;
• If we are not able to provide successful enhancements, new features and modifications to our services, our business could be adversely affected;
• Actual or perceived security vulnerabilities in our services or any breaches of our security controls and unauthorized access to a customer's data could harm our business and operating results; and
• The dual cla** structure of our common stock has the effect of concentrating voting control with those stockholders who held our capital stock prior to the completion of this offering, including our executive officers, employees and directors and their affiliates, which will limit your ability to influence the outcome of important transactions, including a change in control. The holders of our outstanding Cla** B common stock will hold approximately % of the voting power of our outstanding capital stock following this offering.
Corporate Information
Our principal executive offices are located at 4440 El Camino Real, Los Altos, California 94022, and our telephone number is (877) 729-4269. Our website address is www.box.com. Information contained on, or that can be accessed through, our website is not incorporated by reference into this prospectus, and you should not consider information on our website to be part of this prospectus. We were incorporated in 2005 as Box.Net, Inc., a Washington corporation, and later reincorporated in 2008 under the same name as a Delaware corporation. In November 2011, we changed our name to Box, Inc. We recently changed the end of our fiscal year from December 31 to January 31.
Unless expressly indicated or the context requires otherwise, the terms “Box,” “company,” “we,” “us,” and “our” in this prospectus refer to Box, Inc., a Delaware corporation, and, where appropriate, its wholly-owned subsidiaries. The Box design logo, “Box” and our other registered and common law trade names, trademarks and service marks are the property of Box, Inc. This prospectus contains additional trade names, trademarks and service marks of other companies. We do not intend our use or display of other companies' trade names, trademarks or service marks to imply a relationship with, or endorsement or sponsorship of us by, these other companies.
Emerging Growth Company
The Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act (JOBS Act) was enacted in April 2012 with the intention of encouraging capital formation in the United States and reducing the regulatory burden on newly public companies that qualify as “emerging growth companies.” We are an emerging growth company within the meaning of the JOBS Act. As an emerging growth company, we may take advantage of certain exemptions from various public reporting requirements, including the requirement that our internal control over financial reporting be audited by our independent registered public accounting firm pursuant to Section 404 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (Sarbanes-Oxley Act), certain requirements related to the disclosure of executive compensation in this prospectus and in our periodic reports and proxy statements and the requirement that we hold a nonbinding advisory vote on executive compensation and any golden parachute payments. We may take advantage of these exemptions until we are no longer an emerging growth company.
We will remain an emerging growth company until the earliest to occur of (i) the last day of the fiscal year in which we have more than $1.0 billion in annual revenue; (ii) the date we qualify as a “large accelerated filer,” with at least $700 million of equity securities held by non-affiliates; (iii) the date on which we have issued, in any three-year period, more than $1.0 billion in non-convertible debt securities; and (iv) the last day of the fiscal year ending after the fifth anniversary of the completion of this offering.
See the section titled “Risk Factors—Risks Related to Our Business and Our Industry—We are an emerging growth company, and any decision on our part to comply only with certain reduced reporting and disclosure requirements applicable to emerging growth companies could make our Cla** A common stock less attractive to investors” for certain risks related to our status as an emerging growth company.
Risks Related to Our Business and Our Industry
We have a history of cumulative losses, and we do not expect to be profitable for the foreseeable future.
We have incurred significant losses in each period since our inception in 2005. We incurred net losses of $50.3 million in our fiscal year ended December 31, 2011, $112.6 million in our fiscal year ended January 31, 2013, and $168.6 million in our fiscal year ended January 31, 2014. As of January 31, 2014, we had an accumulated deficit of $361.2 million. These losses and accumulated deficit reflect the substantial investments we made to acquire new customers and develop our services. We intend to continue scaling our business to increase our number of users and paying organizations and to meet the increasingly complex needs of our customers. We have invested, and expect to continue to invest, in our sales and marketing organizations to sell our services around the world and in our development organization to deliver additional features and capabilities of our cloud services to address our customers' evolving needs. We also expect to continue to make significant investments in our datacenter infrastructure and in our professional service organization as we focus on customer success. As a result of our continuing investments to scale our business in each of these areas, we do not expect to be profitable for the foreseeable future. Furthermore, to the extent we are successful in increasing our customer base, we will also incur increased losses due to upfront costs a**ociated with acquiring new customers, particularly as a result of the limited free trial version of our service and the nature of subscription revenue, which is generally recognized ratably over the term of the subscription period, which is typically one year, although we also offer our services for terms ranging between one month to three years or more. We cannot a**ure you that we will achieve profitability in the future or that, if we do become profitable, we will sustain profitability.
We have a limited operating history, which makes it difficult to predict our future operating results.
We were incorporated and introduced our first service in 2005. As a result of our limited operating history, our ability to accurately forecast our future operating results is limited and subject to a number of uncertainties. We have encountered, and will continue to encounter, risks and uncertainties frequently experienced by growing companies in rapidly changing industries, such as the risks and uncertainties described herein. If our a**umptions regarding these risks and uncertainties (which we use to plan our business) are incorrect or change due to changes in our markets, or if we do not address these risks and uncertainties successfully, our operating and financial results could differ materially from our expectations, and our business could suffer.
The market in which we participate is intensely competitive, and if we do not compete effectively, our operating results could be harmed.
The market for cloud-based Enterprise Content Collaboration services is fragmented, rapidly evolving and highly competitive, with relatively low barriers to entry for certain applications and services. Many of our competitors and potential competitors are larger and have greater name recognition, much longer operating histories, larger marketing budgets and significantly greater resources than we do. Our competitors include Citrix, Dropbox, EMC, Google, and Microsoft. With the introduction of new technologies and market entrants, we expect competition to continue to intensify in the future. If we fail to compete effectively, our business will.
Risks Related to Ownership of Our Cla** A Common Stock and this Offering
The dual cla** structure of our common stock has the effect of concentrating voting control with those stockholders who held our capital stock prior to the completion of this offering, including our executive officers, employees and directors and their affiliates, which will limit your ability to influence the outcome of important transactions, including a change in control.
Our Cla** B common stock has 10 votes per share, and our Cla** A common stock, which is the stock we are offering in this offering, has one vote per share. Upon the completion of this offering, stockholders who hold shares of our Cla** B common stock, including our executive officers, employees and directors and their affiliates, will collectively hold approximately % of the voting power of our outstanding capital stock. Because of the ten-to-one voting ratio between our Cla** B common stock and Cla** A common stock, after the completion of this offering, the holders of our Cla** B common stock will collectively continue to control a majority of the combined voting power of our capital stock and therefore be able to control all matters submitted to our stockholders for approval so long as the shares of our Cla** B common stock represent at least % of all outstanding shares of our Cla** A common stock and Cla** B common stock. These holders of our Cla** B common stock may also have interests that differ from yours and may vote in a way with which you disagree and which may be adverse to your interests. This concentrated control may have the effect of delaying, preventing or deterring a change in control of our company, could deprive our stockholders of an opportunity to receive a premium for their capital stock as part of a sale of our company and might ultimately affect the market price of our Cla** A common stock.
Future transfers by holders of our Cla** B common stock will generally result in those shares converting into shares of our Cla** A common stock, subject to limited exceptions, such as certain transfers effected for estate planning or charitable purposes. The conversion of shares of our Cla** B common stock into shares of our Cla** A common stock will have the effect, over time, of increasing the relative voting power of those holders of Cla** B common stock who retain their shares in the long term. If, for example, Messrs. Levie, Levin and Smith retain a significant portion of their holdings of our Cla** B common stock for an extended period of time, they could control a significant portion of the voting power of our capital stock for the foreseeable future. As board members, Messrs. Levie, Levin and Smith each owe a fiduciary duty to our stockholders and must act in good faith and in a manner they reasonably believe to be in the best interests of our stockholders. As stockholders, Messrs. Levie, Levin and Smith are entitled to vote their shares in their own interests, which may not always be in the interests of our stockholders generally. For a description of the dual cla** structure, see the section titled “Description of Capital Stock.”
MANAGEMENT'S DISCUSSION AND an*lYSIS OF FINANCIAL CONDITION AND RESULTS OF OPERATIONS
Overview
Box provides a cloud-based, mobile-optimized Enterprise Content Collaboration platform that enables organizations of all sizes to easily and securely manage their content and collaborate internally and externally. Our platform combines powerful, elegant and easy-to-use functionality that is designed for users with the security, scalability and administrative controls required by IT departments. We have built our platform to enable users to get their work done regardless of file format, application environment, operating system, device or location. Our mission is to make organizations more productive, competitive and collaborative by connecting people and their most important information.
We were founded and publicly launched our platform in 2005 with a simple but powerful idea: to make it incredibly easy for people to store, share and access their most important content online. In 2006, we introduced a free version of our product in order to rapidly grow our user base, surpa**ing one million registered users by July 2007. As users began to bring our solution into the workplace, we learned that businesses were eager for a solution to empower user-friendly content sharing and collaboration in a secure, manageable way. Starting in 2007, we began enhancing our platform to serve businesses and large enterprises, which meant expanding our business functionality with features such as our administrative console, identity integration, activity reporting and full-text search. To further satisfy the requirements of IT departments in large organizations, we began to invest heavily in enhancing the security of our platform. Also in 2007, we began to build an enterprise sales team. The continual evolution of our platform features allowed our sales team to sell into increasingly larger organizations. To empower users to work securely from anywhere, we built native applications for all major mobile platforms. The introduction of our iPad application in 2010 further accelerated enterprise adoption of our platform. In 2012, we introduced our Box OneCloud platform and our Box Embed framework to encourage developers and independent software vendors (ISVs) to build powerful applications that connect to Box, furthering the reach of the Box service. In recent years, we have expanded our global presence, opening our first international office in London in 2012, followed by Munich, Paris and Tokyo in 2013. For the six months ended January 31, 2014, revenue from non-U.S. customers represented 20% of our revenue. We expect our revenue from non-U.S. customers to increase at a higher rate than our revenue from U.S. customers in the future.
We offer our solution to our customers as a subscription-based service, with subscription fees based on the requirements of our customers, including the number of users and functionality deployed. The majority of our customers subscribe to our service through one-year contracts, although we also offer our services for terms ranging between one month to three years or more. We typically invoice our customers at the beginning of the term, in multiyear, annual, quarterly or monthly installments. We recognize revenue ratably over the term of the subscription period.
Our objective is to build an enduring business that creates sustainable revenue and earnings growth over the long term. To best achieve this objective, we focus on growing the number of Box users and paying organizations through direct field sales, direct inside sales, indirect channel sales and through word-of-mouth by individual users, some of whom use our services at no cost. Individual users and organizations can also simply sign up to use our solution on our website. We believe this approach not only helps us build a critical ma** of users but also has a viral effect within organizations as more of their employees use our service and encourage their IT professionals to deploy our services to a broader user base.