Some of us were familiar with Zoom before 2020, but for most of the world, ‘Zooming’ suddenly became an important part of life when COVID-19 hit. An enormous proportion of communications which previously happened in person, or on the phone, now takes place using Zoom video calls.

Founder Eric Yuan launched Zoom as ‘Saasbe’ in 2011 with a team of 40 engineers, drawn from his colleagues at Cisco. The following year, the current name was adopted and the first beta version launched. Going fully live in 2013, within a month Zoom boasted over 400,000 unique users and soon crossed the one million mark. Partnerships with platforms such as Salesforce followed, and a 2016 funding round valued the company at over $1 billion. Recently, the COVID19 pandemic was a transformative event for the company, with daily meeting participants increasing 30 times between December 2019 and April 2020. As a result of this, profitability doubled year on year between 2019 and 2020.

Zoom operates on a ‘freemium’ model. The majority of users do not pay for the service and the base offering has no cost to download or operate, but it offers premium services aimed at organizations that carry a monthly fee. Since its launch, Zoom has largely differentiated itself by being cheaper than the competition, and this model has been highly successful - Zoom is unusual among the largest ‘unicorn’ tech companies in that it was already profitable at the time of its IPO and has become more so since.

Zoom listed on the NASDAQ exchange in April 2019 under the ticker ‘ZM’, originally offering shares for sale at $36, which shot up to $66 by the next day. Since then, the shares have continued to perform strongly. Eric Yuan remains the largest shareholder with 8.2% of all shares but Zoom also has significant institutional ownership particularly by T Rowe Price and Vanguard. The shares are also popular with retail investors.