Nearly 15 billion dollars (12.7 billion euros): this is the offer that the videoconferencing giant Zoom made, Sunday, July 18, to acquire Five9, specialist in customer contact. The transaction, which has yet to receive the approval of the shareholders of the target company and that of the US competition authorities, should not be finalized until the first half of 2022.
In a blog post, Zoom boss Eric Yuan indicates that the combination of the two entities should make it possible to “Transforming the way companies communicate with their customers”. First, the two companies will be able to pool their respective customer bases to offer their solutions.
Five9 is one of the companies that dominate the customer contact sector, along with other companies like Nice, Genesys or Talkdesk. Its solution, entirely based on the cloud (dematerialized computing), has the advantage of offering a multi-channel platform allowing business customers to reach them by any type of communication means: call, SMS, social networks, etc. In addition, the tool is integrated with companies’ information systems to enable them to follow up on requests.
The weight of the company founded in 2001 is reflected in its valuation on the stock market: nearly 12 billion dollars. In 2020, it posted revenue of $ 435 million, up 33% from the previous year. It claims 2,000 customers, including many multinationals (Salesforce, Under Armor, Siemens, etc.) and claims to manage 7 billion customer interactions per year.
Central sector
Opposite, Zoom displays even more impressive performances: propelled by the consecration of teleworking thanks to the Covid-19 crisis, it weighs 107 billion dollars on the stock market and has seen its turnover more than quadruple between years 2019 and 2020, to reach $ 2.65 billion.
Under these conditions, the videoconferencing specialist has every interest in investing to fend off competition from Microsoft Teams, Oracle or WebEx, or even Apple, which has new ambitions. But for Thomas Husson, principal analyst at Forrester, the interest of the operation goes beyond: “This is part of Zoom’s desire to create a service platform. She no longer just wants to be confined to this image of killer app inherited from the Covid-19 crisis. “
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