SAWT BEIRUT INTERNATIONAL

| 26 April 2024, Friday |

Zoom to shed about 1,300 jobs as pandemic-fueled demand slows

As demand for the company’s video conferencing services falls with the end of the pandemic, Zoom Video Communications Inc. announced on Tuesday that it would eliminate roughly 1,300 jobs.

On hearing the news, the company’s shares, which dropped 63% last year amid a collapse in technology shares, rose roughly 5%.

CEO Eric Yuan announced the layoffs, which will affect nearly 15% of the company’s workers, and said he would forgo his bonus and accept a 98% pay cut for the upcoming fiscal year.

“We worked tirelessly … but we also made mistakes. We didn’t take as much time as we should have to thoroughly analyze our teams or assess if we were growing sustainably, toward the highest priorities,” Yuan said.

The company, which became a household name during lockdowns due to the popularity of its video-conferencing tools, has seen its revenue growth slow.

Analysts are forecasting Zoom’s revenue to have risen just 6.7% in fiscal 2022 after a more than four-fold jump in revenue and a nine-fold surge in profit increase in 2021. Profit is estimated to have fallen 38% in 2022.

“I would say incrementally, maybe this is telling us we shouldn’t expect reacceleration in the near-term on the revenue side, but we could see additional upside to margins for a company that is already profitable,” RBC Capital Markets analyst Rishi Jaluria said.

Zoom had bumped up hiring during the pandemic to meet surging demand, but now joins U.S. companies in reining in costs to brace for a potential recession.