Pacific Crest Upgrades Box To Overweight, Analysts Call Near-Term Estimates 'Conservative'

In a report published Monday, Pacific Crest analyst Rob Owens upgraded the rating on

to Overweight, while maintaining a price target of $24. "Recent launches of vertical solutions, Box Governance and Enterprise Key Management are increasing competitive differentiation and driving better monetization of the installed base. In addition, a focus on developers is driving adoption within third-party applications," analyst Rob Owens said. Owens believes that competition was "falling behind" in enterprise capabilities and that an expanded product set was creating an opportunity for Box's platform to become "the leading content management and collaboration layer across the enterprise market." Box appears posed to beat estimates in the near term, backed by the robust billings performance recently, new partnerships with IBM and Microsoft, and an expanded product set. In the report Pacific Crest noted, "While large deals have led to billings variability in the past, consistency should improve as the renewals portion of the mix grows; continued execution would likely drive billings results much greater than our estimated 30% CAGR over the next two years."