The San Jose-based teleconference software company Zoom Video Communications Inc. has emerged as one of the biggest winners of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Founded in 2011 and launched in 2013, the company spent its first 8 years steadily building an impressive user base under the leadership of CEO Eric Yuan, former engineer and executive at Cisco Webex. Just two years after launch, Zoom was already providing video conferencing services to over 40 million users.
While Zoom was already enjoying healthy growth and gaining traction with businesses and consumers, the 2020 onslaught of the novel coronavirus would make video conferencing apps into one of the world's most lucrative markets.
During the spring of 2020, mandated lockdowns had billions of people across the world working, learning, and socializing from home, providing the perfect use case for the Zoom app to shine. With reliable, high quality connections and a user-friendly interface, Zoom has quickly become both a household name and one of the fastest growing companies in the world.
From daily active users (DAU) to the numbers of employees, from technical specs to usage statistics, here are 22 Zoom statistics that show how this teleconferencing app skyrocketed to prominence.
Zoom as an employer
1. As of April 2020, Zoom had 2,854 employees. This is an 11% growth over their January 2020 employment numbers. [13]
2. Roughly 60% of Zoom employees are located in the United States; the rest are based in international offices. [13]
3. As of January 2020, Zoom had roughly 700 employees in China working exclusively on research and development. [9]
4. Zoom ranked as Glassdoor’s second best company to work for in the United States for 2019, with a rating of 4.5 out of 5. [10]
Zoom product offerings
5. The platform can continue to deliver a Zoom meeting experience without delays and freezing, even with as much as 40% packet loss. [5]
6. Zoom engineers release more than 200 new or enhanced features annually and dedicate roughly 20% of engineering capacity to building features requested by users. [5]
7. Zoom’s Webinar platform can currently host up to 10,000 view-only attendees as well as 100 panelists. [5]
8. As of April 2020, Zoom has 19 data centers located in Australia, Canada, China, Europe, Hong Kong, India, Japan, Latin America, and the United States. [12]
9. Each of Zoom's data centers is built to run at 50% of peak capacity. [12]
10. Zoom has a latency period of just 150 milliseconds. They achieve this not by optimizing the shared connection between all devices in one meeting (as competitors like Microsoft Teams and Skype do), but instead by specifically tuning the communication for individual device. [1]
Zoom performance stats prior to 2020
11. When Zoom went public in April 2019, its opening price was valued at about 50 times its enterprise value, the highest ratio of any other cloud stock at the time by far. [3]
12. In 2017, the list of Zoom customers included 58% of Fortune 500 companies and 96% of the top universities in the USA. [7]
13. From 2016 to 2019, Zoom was among Okta’s Top 10 Fastest Growing Apps four years in a row. It premiered at #1 in 2016 but fell to number #10 by 2019. [2]
Zoom growth during the COVID-19 pandemic
14. Zoom won more new monthly active users during the first two months of 2020 than they did during all of 2019: 2.22 million new users vs. 1.99 million new users. [3]
15. By the end of January 2020, Zoom usage had reached 100 billion annual meeting minutes. [1]
16. By the end of April 2020, Zoom’s annual meeting minutes had reached 2 trillion. [13]
17. Zoom closed the first quarter of 2020 with $622.7 million in revenue, a 330% increase over the final quarter of 2019. [4]
18. In March 2020, Zoom had 4.84 million users on mobile devices, a 151% increase over the year before. [6]
19. In March 2020, Zoom was used by over 90,000 schools in 20 countries to aid in remote learning during the pandemic. [8]
20. Zoom.us first broke the Amazon's U.S. Alexa Ranking top 100 sites on March 27, 2020. On June 22, 2020, zoom.us was the 7th most visited website in the USA, outranking Wikipedia and Netflix. [11]
21. During the first quarter of 2020, Zoom saw an 354% increase in the number of paying business customers with more than 10 employees. [13]
22. In March 2020, Zoom was used by more than 200 million people daily. This was a 20-fold increase compared to their December 2019 numbers. [8]
Sources
[1] Pierce, D. (2020, March 16). Zoom conquered video chat — now it has even bigger plans. Retrieved from Protocol.com: https://www.protocol.com/zoom-videoconferencing-history-profit
[2] Okta Businesses @ Work 2020 | Technology Industry Trend Report. Retrieved from Okta.com: https://www.okta.com/businesses-at-work/2020#fastest-growing
[3] Novet, J. (2020, February). Zoom has added more videoconferencing users this year than in all of 2019 thanks to coronavirus, Bernstein says. Retrieved from CNBC.com: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/26/zoom-has-added-more-users-so-far-this-year-than-in-2019-bernstein.html
[4] Investor Relations – Zoom. Retrieved from zoom.us: https://investors.zoom.us/
[5] Zoom Investor Briefing – “Our Goal is to make Zoom meetings better than in-person meetings.” Retrieved from Zoom.us on June 21, 2020: https://investors.zoom.us/static-files/f74354f8-d7de-46fa-a519-c41d6733886a
[6] Mukherjee, S. and Rana, A. (2020, March 31). Zoom takes lead over Microsoft Teams as virus keeps Americans at home. Retrieved from Reuters.com: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-zoom/zoom-takes-lead-over-microsoft-teams-as-coronavirus-keeps-americans-at-home-idUSKBN21I3AB
[7] Holmes, G. (2017). Sales Growth Study: How Zoom grew to Millions of Businesses. Retrieved from Freshworks.com: https://www.freshworks.com/freshsales-crm/resources/how-zoom-grew-to-millions-of-businesses-blog/
[8] Yuan, E. (2020, April 1). “Zoom Annoucements: A Message to Our Users.” Retrieved from Zoom.us blog: https://www.freshworks.com/freshsales-crm/resources/how-zoom-grew-to-millions-of-businesses-blog/
[9] Zoom Video Communications US SEC Form 10-K (2020, 31 January). https://web.archive.org/web/20200511122414/https://investors.zoom.us/static-files/09a01665-5f33-4007-8e90-de02219886aa
[10] Economy, Peter (2018, December 5). “Glassdoor Just Announced the 100 Best Places to Work for 2019.” Retrieved from Inc.com: https://www.inc.com/peter-economy/glassdoor-just-announced-100-best-places-to-work-for-2019-is-your-company-on-list.html
[11] Alexa Rank – Site Traffic. Data retrieved from Alexa.com on June 21, 2020: https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/zoom.us
[12] Novet, J. (2020, March 18). Zoom CFO explains how the company is grappling with increased demand. Retrieved from CNBC.com: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/18/zoom-cfo-explains-how-the-company-is-grappling-with-increased-demand.html
[13] Zoom Video Communications Inc (ZM) Q1 2021 Earnings Call Transcript. (2020, June 3). Retrieved from The Motley Fool: https://www.fool.com/earnings/call-transcripts/2020/06/03/zoom-video-communications-inc-zm-q1-2021-earnings.aspx
Last Updated on July 27, 2020 by Alex North