Education
Thanks to the pandemic, Zoom has seen a huge spike in subscribers — and sales
Zoom had a boom quarter after its app became the pandemic 's hottest videoconferencing service. Zoom announced in an earnings report today that it made revenue of $328 million during its quarter of February – April. That's way more than double last year's time when it made $122 million, and it comes far above the $200 million that Zoom predicted it would make when it released guidance only a couple of months ago.
Zoom doesn't know precisely how many people have been using its app over the past few months, but the company says it's added a "unprecedented number of free users," including over 100,000 K-12 schools.
Zoom now has around 265,400 customers with more than 10 employees, a figure that has risen 354 percent, says the company. The significant increase in use has resulted in a significant cost increase, though — expenses doubled to $201 million year-over-year.
The earnings report, Zoom's first since the pandemic was announced, provides a more in-depth look at how the business operated as its video chat app is the de facto resource for work meetings and keeping in contact with family and friends while most of the world is trapped at home. Zoom said previously its usage has risen to 300 million users per day, up from just 10 million in December.
Zoom purchased the Keybase identity service startup in May, and led its engineers to work on a solution for encryption.
Such improvements are intended to ensure that Zoom is not losing users over security issues as its use balloons. And so far it seems as if Zoom is planning to continue its success. Zoom forecasts that next quarter will be massive, more than tripling its previous revenues. The organization expects to produce sales upward of $1.8 billion over the year. Nevertheless, Zoom expects to see increased consumer losses in the second half of the year simply because of how many new users it has gained.
