A year of working from home may have pushed many of us over the edge, but it has been great news for Zoom, the videoconferencing business.
On Monday, the company announced that its revenue had skyrocketed 326% year on year, to $ 2.6 billion, and there were little signs of slowing down by the end of the year. Sales increased 369% in the last quarter, to $ 882.5 million.
“We are honored by our role as a reliable partner and driver of the modern work environment anywhere. Our ability to respond and execute quickly has generated strong financial results over the year, ”said Eric Yuan, founder and CEO of Zoom.
The nine-year-old company became synonymous with video conferencing during the pandemic. Although many now speak of Zoom’s fatigue, coronavirus continues to spread and traditional office life is still on hold for many.
Zoom expects the change to continue until 2021. In the first three months of this year, the company said it expected to generate revenues between $ 900 million and $ 905 million, well above analysts’ estimates.
Workers and students are expected to return to their physical space in the near future, as vaccine supplies increase and the spread of the virus slows down, a prospect that has worried some Zoom investors.
But there are signs that the coronavirus can have a lasting impact on office life. According to a report by Pew Research, before the pandemic, only one in five workers who said that their professional responsibilities could be done mostly from home worked from home all the time or most of the time. Now, 71% of these workers are doing their work at home all the time or most of the time and more than half want to continue working at home even after the pandemic.
In the UK, seven out of ten employees who work remotely said in a Boston Consulting Group survey that they felt as productive at home as they did at the workplace.
It remains to be seen whether the trend will prove resilient enough for Zoom to continue its astronomical growth. “Zoom’s growth has been remarkable to observe. In less than a year, the videoconferencing platform brought together a socially distant world and became the definitive application of the coronavirus era. However, with the vaccine program in full swing and the end of the pandemic in sight, Zoom’s growth over the past year may be difficult to sustain, ”said Rebecca Bezzina, managing director of the digital agency R / GA London.