[crag]

It doesn't matter. The street will eat it up. Wall Street is begging tech to produce - even if that means no profit. They will line up to invest. Also, (and probably) because Box is a potential buy-out. Which is probably why they are doing an IPO in the first place.

Look.. look at Amazon. That company has never posted a profit. And yet every trader I know is falling over themselves throwing money at them. It's the belief in investing in something"sexy", and "new".

[ryana]

"Look.. look at Amazon. That company has never posted a profit. And yet every trader I know is falling over themselves throwing money at them. It's the belief in investing in something"sexy", and "new"."

This is a) a lazy narrative that simplifies the realities of Amazon's business models and b) flat out false.

The last 4 years Amazon has posted EBITDA of $1.497B, $934M, $544M and $506M (2010-2013, respectively). (1)

Over that same time period they've had Net Income of $1.152B, $631M, ($39M), and $274M

So yeah, I'd say unequivocally that $3.481B in EBITDA and $2.018B in Net Income over a four year time span is absolutely "posting a profit."

1) https://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ%3AAMZN&fstype=ii&ei=...

[crag]

Actually I do stand corrected.. cause Amazon DID post a profit, after several quarters of almost no profit or straight-up losses (for the holiday season).

Also this crap about revenue before taxes, interests - etc (your EBITDA) is just that, crap. It's unreliable because a company can decide what is (and what is not) included in the calculation. Of course, this means that a company can change (and many do) this "measure" from reporting period to reporting period. Remember the Dot-Com bust? Companies that had no value, or any chance of value, looked great on paper due to the EBITDA.

EBITDA does not represent a company's cash. More like it's cash flow that it has to service debt (and as I already said, that calculation can be manipulated by the company). It was designed for this purpose in the 80's - the leverage buy-out decade.

// END of rant

EBITDA doesn't measure profit. Or the ability to earn profit. And frankly, it's a cop-out to state to prove a company's value.

[vikp]

Amazon had a crazy long term focus: http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2013/11/04/why-amazon-... . Their lack of a profit seems to be intentional, in that Jeff Bezos is willing to sacrifice short-term profit for a long-term vision. So the traders are actually making a rational choice here.

[batiudrami]

Plus it's a really weird comparison. One of the oldest, and by far the most successful online marketplaces with long term vision vs. a cloud storage startup who is competing against some major players (Google, Dropbox) and is burning through money. I'm unsure of Box too, I just don't see how Amazon is a reasonable comparison.

[crag]

I didn't mean to compare Amazon to Box. I mentioned Amazon to point out another tech company that is a darling of Wall Street - despite unprofitability (generally).

[harvestmoon]

Did you know that many extremely popular movies did not technically make any profit?

[namenotrequired]

That's also because they mark as much of it as possible as "expense", so that they have to pay as little as possible to those who were promised a percentage of profit.