Five vendors doing (relatively) well despite coronavirus chaos
Tech stocks are down across the board, but some are viewing the coronavirus' outbreak as an opportunity
A turbulent time for stock markets globally culminated yesterday in the worst day of trading since Black Monday in 1987.
£160bn was wiped from the FTSE 100 on Thursday, making it the second-biggest crash ever. The US' S&P 500 suffered a similar fate.
Tech stocks are not immune, with even Apple, the most valuable company in the world, seeing its share price plummet by a quarter over the last month.
But some tech vendors have fared better than others, partly due to a surge as the coronavirus was just beginning to spread globally.
Why? Because they specialise in the remote working tech that large parts of the world are preparing to use more regularly than ever before.
We've picked out five tech firms that are having a marginally better time than others at the moment.
Five vendors doing (relatively) well despite coronavirus chaos
Tech stocks are down across the board, but some are viewing the coronavirus' outbreak as an opportunity
Zoom
Zoom is perhaps the vendor to have benefited the most so far, with its share price last week up over 80 per cent from the start of the year.
Even now, after some of the worst days of trading ever recorded, it's still up 60 per cent since the start of 2020.
The videoconferencing and meetings vendor has itself asked staff to work remotely in light of the spread of coronavirus.
Zoom said that the outbreak of the coronavirus accelerated its sales overnight.
On an earnings call at the start of this month, CEO Eric Yaun said that he does not believe this to be a false economy, claiming that it has just made businesses adopt videoconferencing technology sooner than they may have done initially.
"I think that overnight almost everybody read and understood that they needed a tool like this," he said.
"This will dramatically change the landscape. I believe that in the future, everyone will take to video for remote collaboration."
CFO Kelly Steckelberg added that Zoom did not see much impact from the coronavirus in its most recently reported quarter because the dates did not match up, but said that the vendor has seen "significant usage" of the platform and has expanded its capacity because of this.
Five vendors doing (relatively) well despite coronavirus chaos
Tech stocks are down across the board, but some are viewing the coronavirus' outbreak as an opportunity
Slack
The poster child for collaborative working found its stock on many ‘buy lists' created by market analysts a month ago, when businesses were in the early phases of working out the coronavirus' impact.
Slack's share price was up 24 per cent for the year until markets started to dip last week, whereas most other tech companies had already seen a significant decline.
The software firm reported sales for the quarter ending 31 January 2020 yesterday, beating revenue guidance.
But Slack execs dampened the optimism on an earnings call, baking slower growth into its forecasts for Q1, which it is currently in, and Q2.
Execs did however say that they have seen a "significant spike" in the number of sign-ups, particularly for the free version of the software.
CEO Stewart Butterfield said: "I think the headline is there's a massive outpouring of interest on the customer side and it's really all over the place.
"There are existing customers who are accelerating some of their plans; a lot of this is changing.
"We are seeing, at the top of the funnel, new team creation and that's very strongly correlated with the countries that are in the headlines, so we have a pretty good idea of what's causing that."
But the comments were not enough to stop Slack's share price collapsing by a quarter in after-hours trading, as the forecast of slowed growth spooked investors.
Five vendors doing (relatively) well despite coronavirus chaos
Tech stocks are down across the board, but some are viewing the coronavirus' outbreak as an opportunity
Citrix
Citrix published its quarterly numbers in January, so it won't be till the end of next month that we are given an insight into how its business has been affected by the coronavirus.
But analysts have touted Citrix as one of few vendors that could excel over the next few months because of its desktop virtualisation tech.
The vendor itself has said it believes that desktop-as-a-service adoption could be accelerated by the increase in working from home that we're likely to see over the next few months.
In a blog post CEO David Henshall said: "A growing number of customers and organisations are turning to Citrix for advice and support to enable secure remote-work initiatives that can ensure the safety and productivity of their employees and to maintain ongoing business operations throughout this evolving global crisis.
"In the past few weeks, we have shared remote work best-practices and examples from customers around the globe using our virtualisation and workspace solutions to ensure secure and reliable remote access to the applications and information needed to drive business continuity."
Citrix's share price was up about six per cent before markets started to fall away last week.
Five vendors doing (relatively) well despite coronavirus chaos
Tech stocks are down across the board, but some are viewing the coronavirus' outbreak as an opportunity
Microsoft
As the second-most valuable company in the world, Microsoft's share price has certainly taken a kicking over recent weeks, and the vendor was forced to issue a statement revealing that it will miss revenue guidance in its PC division because of the outbreak.
But the shining light for Microsoft is its Teams collaboration tool.
Last week Microsoft said that it has seen an increase in Teams meetings, calls and conference usage of 500 per cent in China since the beginning of the year.
With China being ahead of the curve in terms of the coronavirus outbreak, it's possible that the trend could hit Europe and the US as the situation worsens.
Microsoft has made the premium version of Teams available to everyone for free for six months, and lifted the user limit on the free version of the product.
Five vendors doing (relatively) well despite coronavirus chaos
Tech stocks are down across the board, but some are viewing the coronavirus' outbreak as an opportunity
RingCentral
RingCentral stock has climbed 44 per cent this year, with the cloud-based unified comms player reaping similar rewards to Zoom.
The vendor is one of many to offer free access to its product for a limited amount of time, hoping to convert users into paying customers.
RingCentral has also been working on its own videoconferencing technology, in an effort to take on Zoom. Its sales channel has also been bolstered by a partnership with Avaya, which will see the latter build its cloud offering around RingCentral's tech.
Its share price is currently up seven per cent on the start of the year, in a market that has seen the vast majority of tech vendors see a decline.
Before last week its valuation was up 44 per cent.