Many of us who have lived through economic dislocations such as the one we are currently experiencing will know that adversity seems to bring tremendous opportunity for companies brave enough to embrace it.
I enjoyed reading this article. It seems like Zoom CEO, Eric Yuan, is driven by purpose, not just by profit and it certainly looks like Zoom will turn out to be a winner as working habits change, possibly for good.
We use Zoom extensively, and have done so for years. As we contemplate our plans to have our team work from home, Zoom is central to keeping the team cohesive and coordinated. To us, it will go from being important to critical.
It will be interesting to see how Covid 19 changes work patterns. It doesn't seem that long ago that "Duvet Days" and "Dress Down Fridays" were the mark of a progressive company. What will the post-Coronavirus world of work look like? It has long seemed a nonsense to me that companies force employees to travel miles to all sit together in a ridiculously expensive office between 9 and 5. Look around most offices these days and people are wearing headphones, cocooning themselves away from the hustle and bustle of the office environment. There must be a better way.....
Zoom is far from the only tool standing to benefit from this trend. Analysts point to others like file-sharing service Dropbox, e-signatures business DocuSign and emergency communications business Everbridge as obvious fellow cloud companies that will likely see a boost in usage as the world moves even more online. But few are as richly valued as Zoom, whose shares are up 77% since it went public in April 2019, making Yuan a billionaire. Last Wednesday, the company reported an earnings beat and year-to-year revenue growth of 78%, GAAP operating margins of 5.6% and non-GAAP earnings per share nearly double analyst consensus — and still saw shares dip, though they remained up 24% for the past month as of Thursday’s market close, versus a 27% drop for the S&P 500.