Zoom says competition and job cuts haven’t hurt its business

ZOOM Video Communications president Greg Tomb said the collaboration software business has held up in the face of widespread layoffs and competition.

The video-conferencing company sells software to industries like tech and finance which have been hit by large layoffs. But because most contracts are long-term, the job cuts haven’t hurt Zoom, Tomb said in an interview with Bloomberg in Davos, Switzerland.

“It doesn’t mean people don’t fine-tune here or there when they come up for renewal, but it has not been a big impact,” he said.

Tomb acknowledged that the large-business segment can be competitive since other vendors offer similar collaboration tools for free. For example, Microsoft’s Teams, often bundled with common office tools, has been more widely adopted in recent years.

“There probably are some situations where companies are trying to be super cost-conscious and they’re willing to provide a — I’ll call it less product in terms of functionality and capability — because it’s free to their employees,” Tomb said. Still, he said, companies using Zoom rarely quit the platform.

After gaining millions of users at the height of the pandemic, Zoom is now trying to reverse slowing growth by expanding its tools for business. At its annual user conference in November, the company unveiled email and calendar services, which it hopes will keep more workers on the platform.

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Zoom’s biggest opportunity is getting existing customers — 70 per cent of the Fortune 500 — using features beyond video calls, Tomb said. “A majority of our customers don’t know and leverage our full portfolio” including cloud phone or contact centre services, he said.

Tomb has been in the job since June and previously held leadership roles at Google and SAP. BLOOMBERG