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03:47 GMT, January 25, 2015Box Inc shares soared by more than 65% on its first day of trading.
The company had an IPO of $14 and its shares climbed to as high as $24.73 during early morning trading on Friday, before closing at $23.23.
It was the most anticipated IPO since Alibaba went public last year. The letters IPO stand for Initial Public Offering.
IPO included just a partial release of shares
The company only released 10.5% of their shares in the initial offering. CEO Aaron Levie has a 3.7% stake in the company.
The company planned on going public for a while now. Last year it was about to go public but operational and market factors delayed the plan.
“We’re in the midst of a profound technology shift, as businesses of all sizes move their critical information and processes to the cloud,” Levie said. “It’s an incredible time to be building an enterprise software company, and we couldn’t be more excited about Box’s future.”
The company had a market valuation of $1.7 billion before it went public, but now it’s worth well more than that.
Box has 32 million users
Box Inc, founded in 2005 by Aaron Levie and Dylan Smith, is one of the largest online file sharing and personal cloud content management companies, with a total of approximately 32 million users. It has key partnerships with companies such as Google, VMware, Samsung, and NetSuite (to name a few).
The company’s main competitors are Dropbox, Google Inc’s Drive, Microsoft Corp’s OneDrive, and Citrix Systems Inc’s ShareFile.
Last November Box Inc acquired the medical-imaging software startup MedXT for $3.84 million, a move to expand into the medical sector.
Box Inc posted revenue of $153.8 million for the nine months ended Oct. 31 and net loss of $121.5 million. Analysts expect Box Inc to post revenue of $280 million in 2015.