Tuesday, August 31, 2021
Price slump despite record sales
Zoom breaks one billion dollar mark
The US company Zoom is a winner of the Corona crisis: The video conferencing service is part of everyday home office life for many people. Now for the first time he can show quarterly sales of more than one billion US dollars. But the business outlook lets the stock collapse.
The video conferencing service Zoom continues to boom and broke the one billion dollar mark in sales for the first time in the second quarter. In the three months to the end of July, the company reported that the bottom line was $ 316.9 million (EUR 268.6 million). That was over 70 percent more than in the same period of the previous year.
Zoom continued to benefit from the trend towards home offices, which was accelerated by the corona pandemic. Revenues grew 54 percent to $ 1.02 billion. Although the results were overall above the expectations of Wall Street, the stock collapsed after hours by more than 10 percent.
Zoom gave a relatively cautious business outlook, with the growth forecast for the current quarter, some analysts had calculated more. It is now around 30 percent. There were already some signs in the most recent quarter that the rush of users could ease due to the normalization of the world of work after the Corona crisis. In this way, Zoom gained fewer lucrative major customers than expected.
For many people who work from home, the company has become synonymous with video conferencing, with which employees can exchange ideas and talk to customers, or students can network with teachers. With the advancing vaccination campaigns, however, more and more employees and students are returning to offices and schools, which is why Zoom is increasingly active in the competitive corporate customer market. There the company advertises for subscribers alongside large corporations such as Cisco, Microsoft and Slack from Salesforce.
In order to position itself more broadly, the company, which was founded in San Jose in 2011 and which has meanwhile struggled with security gaps in encryption or so-called zoom-bombing, wants to take over the call center provider Five9 for around 15 billion dollars. Zoom in Germany only struck in June and bought the small company Kites from Karlsruhe, which specializes in real-time solutions for machine translations.
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