Box CEO eyes growth even as customers face challenges

Box CEO Aaron Levie says his company is seeing strong business, even as his customers struggle to deal with inflation, supply-chain challenges and an uncertain path back to traditional office life.

• "Every enterprise on the planet is dealing with some mix of macroeconomic or business-specific challenges," Levie told Axios in an interview following the company's quarterly earnings report Wednesday.

Driving the news: Box, which provides cloud storage and business collaboration tools, reported sales and earnings ahead of prior expectations and raised its outlook for the year. Based on its forecast for the coming quarter, Box has reached a $1 billion run rate, Levie noted.

• Box, Levie said, can help companies that are looking to drive growth even as they cut costs.

Between the lines: Levie said that businesses that depend directly on consumer spending are facing the most pressure. "As consumers deal with inflation they have less money to spend," he said.

• By contrast, he said that business remains "fairly robust" in sectors such as financial services, manufacturing tech and government.
• For its own part, Box is moving forward with its hiring plans for this year, but Levie noted that the company was already heavily focused on improving profits following an activist shareholder campaign. "We are incredibly selective with our investments on headcount," he said.

Meanwhile, other tech companies posting quarterly results on Wednesday were less optimistic, with Salesforce cutting its outlook and Nvidia missing expectations amid what CEO Jensen Huang called a "challenging" gaming environment.