Zoom acquires Five9 and diversifies into customer care

The video conferencing platform, which became hugely popular during the pandemic, has just invested nearly $ 15 billion (14.7 billion to be exact) to purchase Five9, a cloud-based service provider for call centers. As part of the agreement, Five9 shareholders will receive 0.5 Zoom Video Communications Class A common stock for every Five9 share they hold. Following the close of the transaction, scheduled for the first half of 2022 and subject to shareholder approval, Five9 will be a business unit of Zoom and its CEO Rowan Trollope will also become president of Zoom. Zoom’s goal is to improve its appeal to business customers, and is part of a “natural” growth project, as described by the founder and CEO of Zoom Eric Yuan. Five9 is in fact providing software for customer care, and the acquisition aims “to create a platform for customer service that redefines how companies of all sizes relate to their consumers”. “We expect this purchase to help expand Zoom’s presence in a sector, customer care, which is worth 24 billion,” Eric Yuan posted on the company’s blog, “and we seriously believe that together we will enable our customers to reimagine the how they manage their business, helping them to report exceptional results ”. A way for Zoom to expand and diversify, as the company has to work hard to find new outlets and new ways to grow, with offices reopening and the need for conference calls starting to decrease. It will not fade, that’s for sure: the world of work has changed and decentralized, companies have discovered new flexibility and have begun to appreciate the option of hiring people who work exclusively remotely. Still, Zoom cannot be expected to maintain the same pace of growth without expanding into new markets.At the start of closures due to Covid in March 2020, Zoom had experienced an unprecedented download boom. Everyone had started using it for work, for distance learning lessons, but also for parties, aperitifs, dinners, family video calls and even religious services, making it the new key to a social, school and working life, suddenly confined between four walls. This is thanks to the features included in its free version, far superior to competitors (from the number of participants to the customization), and to the low costs (between 15 and 19 dollars) of the monthly subscription, in addition to the ease of use that does not require you to download software to join meetings. To give just one figure, between April and November 2020, its shares grew by 600%. Five9’s business also saw significant growth over the course of 2020, reaching a turnover of 33% more, with revenues of 435 million dollars. Zoom recently announced plans for another major acquisition, that of Kites, a German company that has developed a machine translation solution for transcription and translation in real time. Zoom already has the ability to activate simultaneous transcriptions of conversations, but only for the English language. With Kites he hopes to be able to give the short time the opportunity to overcome even language barriers.