Lei Jianping reported on September 2
The continuation of the epidemic in Europe and the United States has greatly benefited video conferencing app developer Zoom, and after releasing a new earnings report, Zoom's stock price rose 40.78% today, with a market value of $129.1 billion.
Zoom's market capitalization has surpassed that of established tech company IBM or computer processor maker AMD, and more than twice that of virtual machine software company VMware.
Zoom was listed in the first half of 2019, when the initial offering range was $28 to $32, and Zoom's current share price is $457.69, up 16 times from the lowest offering range ever.
Yuan Zheng's wealth exceeds $27 billion
Zoom's revenue for the second quarter of fiscal 2021 was $663.5 million, up 355 percent from $146 million in the year-ago quarter, according to the earnings report.
Zoom's net profit for the second quarter of fiscal 2021 was $186 million, up 3253% from $5.54 million in the year-ago quarter.
Zoom's results exceeded analyst consensus expectations. At the same time, Zoom raised its full-year performance guidance.
The sharp rise in Zoom's stock price also made the wealth of Chinese CEO Yuan Zheng increase overnight. Based on a market capitalization of $129.1 billion, Yuan Zheng's current wealth exceeds $27 billion.
He has applied for a visa nine times and rejected eight times
Speaking of Yuan Zheng, there is a story, Yuan Zheng was born in Tai'an, Shandong, when he was a child, a big hobby was to read books and buy books, in 1996 he wanted to sell books online, should be the first Chinese with such ideas.
But at that time, the domestic money circulation was through the post office wire transfer, Yuan Zheng could not find a convenient way to collect money from customers, so he wanted to go to the United States to see how they did the Internet.
Yuan Zheng's application for a U.S. visa was rejected eight times, and it was not until after the ninth visa application was approved that Yuan Zheng arrived in the United States in August 1997 and began to work at WebEx.
When he first arrived in the United States, the language barrier caused Yuan Zheng to write code at the company until 2002. One of the biggest changes to Yuan's fortunes in the United States was Cisco's $3.2 billion acquisition of WebEx.
Zoom said of Yuan zheng on its website: "When he was a founding engineer and vice president of engineering at Webex from 1997 to 2011, Yuan Zheng was the core and soul of Webex products. ”
From engineer to vice president, Yuan Zheng worked at WebEx for 14 years. In 2007, Cisco acquired WebEx for $3.2 billion.
Yuan zheng was subsequently promoted to vice president of engineering at Cisco. Cisco's web conferencing vendor WebEx grew from its initial 10 engineers to more than 800 and increased its revenue growth to more than $800 million.
For most Chinese engineers in Silicon Valley, reaching such a position is the "peak of life".
But Yuan Zheng was not satisfied with this, and decided to start a business in 2011, and more than 40 engineers followed him to leave to start Zoom. Yuan Zheng decided to start a business in 2011, and more than 40 engineers followed him to start Zoom.
Yuan Zheng said that leaving Cisco to do Zoom at that time was mainly based on the following reasons:
In theory, it took more than ten years of time and effort to do WebEx, and customers should be happier, but in fact, in 2011, every time I went to visit customers, I found that no customer was happy.
Yuan Zheng pointed out that at that time, Cisco did not need new business, and planned to form a team to do it itself.
A month later, Zoom was formed. With the entry of silicon valley friends, Li Ka-shing, Sequoia Capital and other capital, zoom has slowly developed and grown. ”
It is said that the prototype of Zoom is also related to Yuan Zheng's experience in the 1980s. At that time, he was still in college, and because he was suffering from a long "long-distance relationship" with his girlfriend, he came up with the idea of developing remote video software.
At the beginning of Zoom's establishment, the web conferencing software market was fiercely competitive, with giants such as WebEx opening up, followed by Apple Facetime and Google Hangout that appeared almost at the same time.
Even so, Zoom still stood out as a "dark horse" and eventually went public in April 2019, with a market capitalization of $9.24 billion at the issue price. Subsequently, the opening day of the market rose by 85%.
One reason for Zoom's success is that it has "Chinese ancestry", and R&D is in China, where the cost of R&D personnel is much cheaper than in the United States, which makes its products competitive.
Redpoint Ventures' Tomasz Tunguz has said on its blog that "a key driver of Zoom's profitability is labor arbitrage," a shift of jobs to areas with low labor costs, a growing trend among tech companies.
Even Zoom acknowledged in the prospectus that it employs more than 500 employees at multiple R&D centers in China, about 30 percent of its workforce and 70 percent of its non-U.S. workforce.
Drifting away from China
Since 2020, Zoom has been running from time to time.
The protracted global pneumonia epidemic has hit most industries, but the remote work field is very hot, especially Zoom, which focuses on the segment of remote conferencing, is even more red.
Zoom's daily active users increased from 10 million in December 2019 to 200 million, and European and American users held meetings, attended classes, did training, visited relatives, friends, doctors, and even used Zoom for weddings and funerals.
At the beginning of 2020, Hillhouse Capital emptied the equity of Weilai Automobile, repositioned Zoom, and made a lot of money. Zoom's current share price has risen 14 times from its issue price.
Of course, Zoom, who became a popular fried chicken, has encountered troubles, such as privacy issues, and Zoom is facing more and more censorship.
Previously, zoom faced a problem that it could not do end-to-end encryption. Someone can participate in and maliciously disrupt the video conference without being invited, forcing the meeting to be suspended. This spoof is known as "Zoom-bombing."
Another problem with Zoom is that it involves Facebook, and Zoom doesn't even inform users that it sends analytics data to Facebook in accordance with its privacy policy.
Tens of thousands of private Zoom videos are uploaded to the public web page, and anyone can watch them online.
SpaceX, the space company of Tesla CEO Elon Musk, declared through a memo that employees are banned from using the Zoom app, saying it has "serious privacy and security concerns."
A large number of security and privacy complaints made Yuan Zheng feel helpless and apologized, saying that the problem occurred because the program allowed users to log in through Facebook, and the code has been deleted.
"It feels like we've been targeted," "Now, we see some negative news every day." I just suddenly don't know where this all came from. ”
Yuan zheng said that he would suspend zoom new product development until privacy and security issues were resolved.
Zoom is also affected by tensions between China and the United States, and Zoom has issued a statement on its Chinese website that it will no longer directly sell new Zoom services or upgrade services to customers whose billing address is Chinese mainland from August 23. After the dropshipping service was discontinued, Zoom only mentioned the model of selling through partners.
Zoom is reporting that it is reducing its dependence on China, announcing that it will significantly increase its existing staff in India and will also build new data centers at its technology centers in Bangalore and Hyderabad.
It can be said that Zoom is de-Sinicizing today and is gradually drifting away from China.
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