Who’s zoomin’ who? That’s the key question in the videoconferencing sector, where a shift to home-based work and learning has driven a mammoth increase in the use of web-based platforms generally, and Zoom Video Communications ’ in particular.
There are plenty of competitors in the sector. Cisco Systems (ticker: CSCO) has WebEx. Verizon Communications (VZ) just agreed to buy privately held BlueJeans Network. There’s Alphabet’s (GOOGL) Google Hangouts (which is what we use for internal meetings here at Barron’s). Facebook (FB) has just launched a new free meeting service for Messenger, and RingCentral (RNG) also has announced a new videoconferencing service. But the biggest threat to Zoom’s dominance of corporate videoconferencing might be Microsoft Teams, the software giant’s rapidly growing unified communications platform.
If this situation gives you a sense of déjà vu, well, it should. Microsoft (MSFT) is now going after Zoom (ZM) in videoconferencing the same way it is taking on Slack Technologies (WORK) in collaborative messaging. Teams has evolved into Slack’s archenemy. And while the video landscape is more complicated, Microsoft is clearly working to lever its own strengths with enterprise and small-business customers to win business away from Zoom at a time when it is under attack over privacy and security issues.
Compounding matters is the question of how to count customers. On an April 22 webinar, Zoom CEO Eric Yuan said that the company had hit 300 million daily meeting participants, up from 200 million at the beginning of April. But in a later blog post, the company characterized the number as measuring users—if you do five Zoom calls in a day, you are one user, but five participants. Zoom has clarified to say it meant participants, not users.
Meanwhile, Microsoft disclosed in a post Thursday that the company saw Teams video use peak at more than 200 million meeting participants in a day in April, generating more than 4.1 billion meeting minutes. Teams now has more than 75 million daily active users, the company said.
Microsoft’s post actually does a nice job of laying out the definitions of the various relevant metrics. Participants are the number of people in a meeting—go to five meetings, and they count you five times. Minutes include time spent by individual users—two people in a 10-minute meeting equals 20 minutes. Daily active users include anyone who takes an intentional action on Teams in a 24-hour period—in that measure, people are only counted once.
All of this focus on the size of user populations is weighing a little on Zoom shares, which on Thursday closed down 7.7%, to $135.17.
Write to Eric J. Savitz at eric.savitz@barrons.com
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Zoom Stock Slides as ‘User’ Numbers Come Into Focus - Barron's
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