Breaking reports today show how the Zoom video conferencing business is rapidly becoming a success story in today’s coronavirus-impacted business world.
You can chart Zoom’s progress by the net worth of its founder, which the Guardian reports has grown by more than $4 billion since the beginning of this month, or by Zoom’s stock (ZM) which has nearly doubled since Christmas, or by user metrics, where a tracking firm looking at Zoom volume saw a significant increase in user traffic from January (around 50,000 users, reportedly.)
Alternately, you can look at the actual instances of businesses, organizations and individuals climbing onto the Zoom platform due to coronavirus closures.
Schools, churches and other organizations offering large-scale assembly have ported a lot of their face-to-face traffic onto the Zoom, platform and that’s a lot of what’s driving this sudden Zoom boom.
“Zoom Chief Executive Eric Yuan pointed to ‘a large increase in the number of free users, meeting minutes and new video use cases’ during Zoom’s earnings call in early March, when many countries in Asia and Europe were in the midst of transitioning to remote work but most U.S. companies had yet to make the shift,” wrote Emily Bary at Market Watch yesterday.
Now Yuan, who holds 20% of Zoom’s shares, has basically doubled his net worth, as Guardian Wealth Correspondent Rupert Neate further reported today, to clamber ahead of Richie-Rich icons like George Soros, George Lucas and Richard Branson.
“I hope this crisis can be over very, very soon, but one thing I know for sure is that companies will learn this is the way to work,” Yuan said, according to Neate’s article, tempering his aspirations with concern for the world’s population. “I am pretty sure almost every company will be thinking about it and [will] say, ‘hey, maybe working from home makes sense’, and maybe let every employee work from home, maybe once a week. Previously, a lot of businesses didn’t even want to try.”
