Zoom reveals phone product spike, public offer price

Just before the two-year anniversary of the availability of what has become a core product in Zoom’s unified communications platform, and as it announced the pricing of an underwritten public offering of 5,147,059 shares of its Class A common stock, Zoom Video Communications has revealed that it has racked up a million seat sales of its Zoom Phone product line.

Zoom Phone is a core product in Zoom’s unified communications platform, which also includes Zoom Meetings, Zoom Chat, Zoom Rooms and Zoom Video Webinars. Built on a secure, scalable, global architecture optimised for a video-first experience, it is said to have the features of a business phone system while providing a modern unified communications experience across both desktop and mobile devices. Features include centralised management, contact centre integration and global call routing. Zoom Phone is currently available in 44 countries and territories, and, through bring-your-own-carrier, is also available globally.

Zoom said the product’s “impressive” growth illustrated the value Zoom Phone brought to customers, with Elka Popova, vice-president of connected work research at analyst Frost & Sullivan proclaiming the product as having been “an astounding success”. 

“Thanks to its innovative pricing model and widespread availability in 44 countries and territories, it has quickly become an attractive option for many SMB and enterprise customers around the world,” she said.

“We are excited to see this level of uptake in such a short timeframe,” added Graeme Geddes, head of Zoom Phone. “Our customers have come to rely on Zoom to deliver amazing video and audio for them at scale, and they’re seeing tremendous value in consolidating and modernising their telephony services with us as well. This milestone really speaks to the level of trust we have built with our customers.”

One key account for the product has been eBay. Commenting on the use of the product at the corporation, Susan Delaney, director of global network services, said: “Zoom Phone has been incredibly valuable when it comes to keeping our teams connected. The one-click option to elevate calls to meetings allowed our users ease and reduced time spent, alleviating the need to juggle multiple platforms. Zoom’s pricing plans made it easy to roll out a single solution across our offices around the world.”

As regards its own corporation, Zoom revealed the pricing of an underwritten public offering of just over five million shares of its Class A common stock. These will be available to the public for $340 per share and the company expects aggregate gross proceeds from the offering in the region of $1.75bn.

Not surprisingly, given the ongoing situation regarding Covid-19 and work-from-home orders, the company is still on a financial roll. On 1 December 2020, it announced total revenues of $777.2m for the three-month period to 31 October 2020, up 367% year-on-year, while GAAP income from operations was $192.2m, compared with a GAAP loss from operations of $1.7m in the third quarter of the previous fiscal year. Driving the revenue increase in the quarter was the company’s ongoing influx of customers, including acquiring new customers and expanding across existing customers.