Zoom reveals true scale of scorching Q1 growth

Revenue skyrockets 169 per cent

Zoom saw its sales rocket 169 per cent in its recently closed quarter as people across the globed turned to video conference to stay connected.

Revenue grew to $328.2m in the quarter ending 30 April, while operating income rocketed from $1.6m to $23.4m.

Zoom also highlighted that the number of businesses with over 10 employees using its platform increased 354 per cent year on year.

CEO Eric Yuan talked investors through some of the challenges the vendor has faced, in particular public scrutiny for security vulnerabilities which let to Zoom acquiring Keybase for its encryption capabilities.

"While the COVID-19 pandemic has expanded our market opportunities, it also brought us many challenges," he said.

"Prior to the pandemic, Zoom was primarily built for and used by large enterprises and institutions. During the crisis, with good intentions, we opened our platform to unprecedented numbers of first-time users without fully considering the challenges it would bring to those who did not have full IT support, or established protocols for security and privacy like our enterprise customers.

"As a result, we have experienced negative price related to meeting disruption, security and privacy issues."

Yuan also moved to defuse the public tussle between Oracle and AWS, both of which have been scrambling for PR over their relationship with Zoom.

"Immediately during the crisis, our long-time partner AWS and its CEO Andy Jassy enabled us to meet this rapidly increasing demand," he said.

"As our demand increased and we had limited visibility into the growth, AWS was able to respond quickly by provisioning the majority of the new servers we needed, so sometimes adding several thousand a day for several days in a row.

"In April, our customer Oracle also showed a great support to help us. Not only did Larry Ellison record a great video to encourage our team to do the right things for the world, but also offered Oracle cloud support. We also provisioned a number of servers in the Oracle cloud as the demand for Zoom continued to increase. We are so grateful for their partnership and their responsiveness to provide capacity during this time."