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Comment by avrionov | Hacker News Reader

Very good point about the pricing. Looking at their income statement [1] DropBox is not a very efficient company:

Cost Of Revenues: $413.7M (22%) in software companies this includes Operations and customer care. There are spending as much as video sharing sites or video conferencing app.

R&D Expenses: $727.8M (39%). This is an insanely high number for a company that is not a startup. The average for bigger companies is below 20%.

If their growth doesn't recover, which will be difficult, they are going to be a prime target for acquisition from Private equity. PE will slash the expenses significantly and run them for a profit for 5-10 years.

[1] https://seekingalpha.com/symbol/DBX/income-statement

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> R&D Expenses: $727.8M (39%). This is an insanely high number for a company that is not a startup.

Last I just checked they tried to crawl out of their “it’s all about files. Simple!”-niche and become a fully web-based project management, chat, collaboration, office-thingie with links to GSuite and Office365.

As a long-time user it was quite incomprehensible, and definitely nothing I appreciated or felt added value to my Dropbox. On the contrary, I was annoyed by all the product-nagging about these features I didn’t want.

Combine that with them obsoleting long-established features in their desktop sync-software which made them the only universal file-sync solution across all platforms, the reason I chose Dropbox over competing offers.

Do all that, and you lost people like me as a user. I’m on Nextcloud now and not coming back.

I really don’t think they have worked out their survival plan yet. Trying to outcompete MS and Google on their own turf is obviously not a fight they’re going to win.

This is out of context. Maybe show how these costs have been changing over time vs revenue change to make it more meaningful.

Seeking Alpha link has the changes over time. They were able to reduce the expenses in the last 2 years, but the investors are going to compare them with their competitors, not only with the previous years. FB for example has engineering expenses of 21% better position on the market place and better growth.

Dropbox in the current state can become a target for activist investors like Elliot. The high percent R&D expenses make them more attractive because there is more to cut.

Since when FB is a Dropbox competitor? I'm sure their engineering expenses will continue to drop, esp with the whatsapp exodus to Signal...

Joking aside...

> They were able to reduce the expenses in the last 2 years

That sounds pretty good to me! Reduce expenses but revenue is growing and revenue per user is growing. So they make more money without growing costs. That's great. With the layoffs that ratio would even improve.

Google engineering expenses are 16%.

We can disagree on their future, but for me it is likely that they'll face more challenges and more pressure from the investors.

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