Zoom: The video conferencing company had quite a year, but how do the company's prospects look post-pandemic?

Few companies have become as synonymous with the pandemic as Zoom. The video conferencing software that entered most of our lives last March is even starting to enter our language as a verb, much in the same way that Google did for search. Shall we Zoom next week? Yeah, I'm free.

So it's no surprise then that Zoom clocked in a phenomenal $882m of revenue in its latest quarter, up from $188m in its last pre-pandemic quarter — almost a fivefold jump in just a year. That explosive growth even translated into the rarest of things for many fast-growing tech companies — actual profits.

‍Peak Zoom?

‍With all that said, the future for Zoom looks slightly less exciting. In their earnings release this week, Zoom indicated to investors that they expect revenue to clock in at just under $3.8bn for the coming 12 months. If that estimate is correct, as the chart shows, it would represent a pretty sizeable slowdown in growth, with revenue expected to grow just ~2% in the next quarter Zoom reports.

‍Zoom fatigue

‍It's possible that Zoom management are just trying to be conservative after a stellar year, but it's also true that Zoom fatigue is a very real thing (a recent Stanford study actually found 4 reasons as to why we feel so tired after hours of video calls).

Ask 5 people what they think the future of work looks like, and you'll probably get 5 different answers. For Zoom to keep growing it needs to hope two things happen. The first is that the use of video calls sticks around at this elevated level, and the second is that a bigger tech company doesn't come and eat their lunch in an industry where brand loyalty is unlikely to be very strong.