Zoom Video Communication, the company behind Zoom Meeting, started its fiscal year on February 1st—and what a time to do so. While the company has had nothing but steady growth going back to the first quarter of 2019 (fiscal year, not calendar), the first quarter of fiscal year 2020 saw an amazing 169 percent revenue increase year over year.
Our partners at Statista put together the chart above to show the growth based on Zoom's results report. It's obviously fueled by the fact that Zoom's Q1 2021 (fiscal year, remember!) happened to coincide with the global pandemic caused by the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19, which in turn caused so many people to start working from home and doing video conferences.
In a statement, Eric S. Yuan, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Zoom said, "The COVID-19 crisis has driven higher demand for distributed, face-to-face interactions and collaboration using Zoom. Use cases have grown rapidly as people integrated Zoom into their work, learning, and personal lives."
We reported in April that Zoom was already hitting 300 million daily users. But growth came with growing pains: everything from Zoom-bombings that required security upgrades (they're easily prevented now), to reports recently that free use of the service may come at the cost of any hope of privacy.
Many companies have banned the use of Zoom, including SpaceX, NASA, and Google. (A few companies have banished Google Meet/Hangouts, too, to be fair.) So have many banks and some governments. If you're not enamored of Zoom, here are some alternatives.
It doesn't appear to be hurting Zoom much where it counts, but maybe the financials of Q2 for (fiscal year) 2021 will tell a different tale.