Zoom profits soar as workers flock to the tech firm during coronavirus lockdown
Zoom profits and sales have soared as workers and friends from across the globe stuck in lockdown used the tool to talk with one another.
The company’s popularity stems from the fact it is easy to use and can be used to conduct business meeting as well as sociable drinks events.
Sales at the teleconferencing company came in at $328 million between February and April, much higher than financial analysts had expected.
The figures showed the company has 265,400 paying customers, a near fourfold increase from a year earlier. At its peak, the firm counted more than 300 million daily participants in virtual meetings.
For the full year, Zoom now expects revenue of $1.8 billion.
Eric Yuan, chief executive and co-founder, said: “We were humbled by the accelerated adoption of the Zoom platform around the globe.”
Profits were also impressive. Zoom recorded $27 million for the three months compared with $198,000 a year ago.
The San Jose based company is the latest tech darling to emerge from San Francisco, with other firms like Slack also seeing it business soar during lockdown.
Zoom listed on the Nasdaq in New York last year and late last night its shares rose 3% after the results.
The share price increase means Zoom now has a market value of about $59 billion, greater than the combined market values of the four largest US airlines, which have seen their businesses hammered by the coronavirus outbreak that has dramatically curtailed travel.
But questions remain over Zoom's security practises, with people accessing calls uninvited.
Zoom competes with Cisco Systems, Microsoft Teams and Google.
One of Zoom’s biggest costs is data centers and bandwidth to host calls. The company runs some of its own data centers, but also pays for cloud computing services from Amazon Web Services and Microsoft.
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