Cloud storage specialist Dropbox is going public, and its numbers are coming under scrutiny. In this segment from Industry Focus: Tech, host Dylan Lewis and Motley Fool contributor Evan Niu take a closer look at two of Dropbox's most important metrics: average revenue per user and annualized net revenue retention rate.
Find out how these metrics have trended for Dropbox recently, and what investors might expect to see going forward.
A full transcript follows the video.
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Dylan Lewis: Another core metric I think is worth keeping in mind if you're looking at this business is ARPU. This is something that we are familiar with with a lot of the social-media businesses. It's an important one here as we talk about this large base that they're looking at. The ARPU is specific to paying users. It does not look at that 500 million number we were talking about before. It's currently around $111.91. That's actually down from where it was in 2015, around $113.51. The company blames some currency fluctuations for that. It's improved since 2016, but it hasn't really moved up meaningfully. The growth there isn't that great.
Evan Niu: Right, and I also wouldn't expect it to be going forward, either. Cloud storage in general as a market has been undergoing this ongoing price for for literally years. The past two or three years, there's been consistent cuts across the board. That boils down to a little less than $10 per paying user per month, on average. That's a pretty solid revenue base.
Lewis: The best way for them to get that going, and in the right direction, is to get people on those higher-priced enterprise plans, which, they can only get so many folks doing that. It's going to be a challenge.
One last number I think it's worth mentioning is specific to this business. It's their annualized net revenue retention rate. This figure is basically a comps number that looks at the dollar-value captured from a cohort of customers from one year ago to the next year. You'll see this with a lot of subscription businesses. Actually, Twilio has something similar. The blended average across their individual and business accounts for the metric was 90% as of Dec. 31, 2017. So, if you want to think about this a different way, if the company didn't add any new paying customers over the course of the year, they would have posted 90% of the revenue that they did a year prior. It's kind of a wonky number, but if gives you a sense if what's going on with customer retention, churn, and their ability to move people to higher priced products.
Niu: And that's a strong number, 90%. I think it goes to show how loyal these users are. Dropbox's user base is pretty fanatical about it. They have a really strong brand among individual users.
Lewis: And actually, what's incredible is, that's a blended number I talked about. That's individuals and business. If you go specifically to the Dropbox business segment, that figure was 100%, which is amazing.
Niu: Yeah, that's unheard of.
