What Covid-19 did for Zoom.us & What Zoom.us did for Covid-19
Even in the face of such good business, Zoom has not sat idle
California-based Zoom Video Communications is known for its online video-conferencing platform that could help people work and study from home. It is one of the few companies in the world right now that are benefiting from the Coronavirus.
Zoom is a relatively new player in the videoconferencing space. Before the coronavirus crisis, the app had slowly been gaining traction in the Silicon Valley startup space, reportedly because of their superior low-latency connection which generally experience small delay times. However, their traffic spiked spectacularly after the crisis took over the world.
As public places start to empty and people are introduced to the wonders of remote work, the demand for Zoom increased in a way even the CEO, Eric Yuan must have been unprepared for. His company had already been spending a lot on marketing over the past couple of months and was perfectly positioned to help the entire world to stop travelling and to start working from home. And yet, the engineers must have been going through enormous stress to provision ten times more servers than they expected to use that day in order to meet the new demand.
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As a result of their newfound popularity, Zoom has gone on to gain more monthly active users in the first quarter of 2020 than they did in the entirety of 2019. Even after Coronavirus blows over, millions of people will become aware of Zoom and what they do. This brand recognition and the positive association will last a lifetime for Zoom and yield reward many years into the future. Their stock is now up almost 100% since the Coronavirus started.
Analysts at Bernstein Research said, "Zoom has added 3.5x more MAUs YTD [year to date] than the same period of 2019 (2.22 vs. 0.64 million), so even with half the normal paid user conversion rate, this would still yield 74% y/y growth in paid user adds YTD"
Even in the face of such good business, Zoom has not sat idle. They extended their free trial, removing time limits for every user in China and most importantly offering their service for free to schools and educational institutions all over the world.
In Eric Yuan's own words, "I think after this crisis is over, people will realize that to work at home probably is not bad."
