When the whole world went into COVID-19 lockdown, the internet became as important as water or food -- either to kill time, work, or learn something new.?
However, with this, video conferencing apps started gaining emphasis, for helping people stay connected while being miles away and saving their lives from the novel coronavirus.
Zoom was one video conferencing app that has truly seen a major shift in the number of users every since the lockdown was first introduced.?
And despite the controversies it was engulfed in pertaining to privacy, today, Zoom has announced that it crossed over 300 million daily participants in the month of April.
The video conferencing app revealed this in its earnings for Q1 of 2020. Zoom has managed to earn a revenue of $328.2 million -- up by 160 percent year over year. What¡¯s even more astonishing is that out of the $328.2 million, $252 million was generated in free cash flow (as pointed out by Turner Kocac, General Partner at GeltVC).?
Zoom¡¯s daily participant numbers are up from 10 million in December 2019. This includes free as well as paid Zoom users. The app has also reported the meeting minutes grew from 100 billion in January to nearly two trillion minutes in April.?
In fact, 265,4000 companies/customers who have more than 10 employees working under them have shot up by a shocking 354 percent year over year.?
Eric S. Yuan, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Zoom said in a statement, ¡°We were humbled by the accelerated adoption of the Zoom platform around the globe in Q1. The COVID-19 crisis has driven higher demand for distributed, face-to-face interactions and collaboration using Zoom. Use cases have grown rapidly as people integrated Zoom into their work, learning, and personal lives.¡±
He added, ¡°I am proud of our Zoom employees who dedicated themselves to support customers and the global community during this crisis. With their tremendous efforts, we were able to provide high-quality video services to new and existing customers.
All that's great, but fears around Zoom's security issues persist, leading to the rise of existing alternatives from Cisco, Google, and Microsoft.