Dropbox goes DACH in Hamburg

Located on Valentinskamp 24, Hamburg, a new Dropbox office has opened in Germany.  With the company claiming that one in three internet users in DACH are using it for hosting their files it makes sense for the company to open its fifth European office there. That it is one in three is surprising bearing in mind that it will not be until Q3 in 2016 that Dropbox are able to host files on German soil. Normally data sovereignty for Germans is of great importance but it seems like the ease of use of the Dropbox solution has done little to dent its popularity.

Dropbox are also claiming that those users have created over 163 million connections which is the most collaborative of any region that Dropbox operates in. Germany is clearly of key importance to the company and as it looks to expand within the wider region it will hope to sign up an increasing number of corporate deals. That Dropbox already has more than 8,000 teams in Germany using the collaboration tools under Dropbox Business possibly shows that while data sovereignty may be important it is not always in business the inhibitor that some people infer.

Located in the heart of Hamburg, the office will help to add feet on the ground to sell the business solution into the German market. Once the data is hosted in Germany this should enable the company to expand faster and further. It already has signed up some leading brands in the region including Bauer Media, Expedia, Mathys & Scheitlin AG, Audibene, TUI Group, and the German Development Institute.

This the fifth office opened in Europe. Dublin, the international headquarters for Dropbox was opened in 2013. London and Paris were both opened in early 2015. The Amsterdam office was opened in February, 2016 to cover the Benelux countries. Interestingly there are currently no jobs advertised for the new Hamburg location so it will be interesting to see whether this is just a sales office using existing staff.

Conclusion

Dropbox has been expanding steadily in Europe over the last few years. This international expansion seems to be speeding up and once they have hosted data within Europe it will be interesting whether that will help them corner the file sharing market. There is fierce competition especially with Box doing a deal with IBM to take advantage of IBM’s SoftLayer data centres.

If Dropbox can gather sufficient market share and profitable revenues then it may look for an IPO again once the rapid expansion is complete. Investors will be looking to realise their investment at some point and it will be interesting to see what further plans Dropbox has for European expansion. Spain and Italy are obvious choices but the company may look towards Eastern Europe as well.