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Zoom reports 5,000% rise in annual profits, aims to double down on Apps ecosystem.

"If you look at it from a CIO or IT perspective..."

Zoom saw GAAP income from operations for its full fiscal 2021 hit $659.8 million -- up a colossal 5,200% on the previous year. Q4 revenue alone hit $882.5 million, with full-year revenue of $2.6 billion. up 326% year-over-year.

By the end of its fiscal 2021 Q4 (January 31, 2021) Zoom had approximately 467,100 customers with more than 10 employees, up 470% on-year, with 1,644 customers contributing more than $100,000 in 12-month revenue, as enterprises booked seats for workforces bedding in to fully remote employment.

The company plans to take $4.2 billion out of its coffers this coming year meanwhile -- with the aim of building out more data centre infrastructure and capitalising on M&A opportunities, CFO Kelly Steckelberg said on an earnings call.

Talking to analysts CEO Eric Yuan, meanwhile, said Microsoft's Teams had not been a threat to Zoom's growth, with research showing that many customers were subscribing to both Zoom and Teams.

As he put it: "If you look at it from an end-user perspective, especially if you look at it from today's workforce, almost over one-third are millennials. Guess what? They would like to use the best-of-breed service. If you give them something they do not like, they say, 'no, I'd like to pay it with my own credit card.'

"So the best-of-breed service will win, for sure. And also, if you look at it even from a CIO or IT perspective, they would like to bet on two vendors, right? If you're stuck with one vendor for everything, guess what: what if there's [an] outage? What if, in the future, [their] innovation speed slows down?"

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Zoom Apps, sample.

Zoom aims to offer more than just a video conference platform and touted the "tremendous" upsell opportunities for Zoom Phone, the company's cloud-based telephony service. As CEO Yuan put it: "We're not only a video conferencing company anymore. [We have a] platform play. So today, in addition to having the APIs and SDKs to give third-party companies and partners vertical apps like online education, telemedicine via our platform, SDK, we also introduced Zoom Apps. I think that's our future."

"You and I kind of use Zoom and also have a window, right? You and I can play games together, you approve my expense report, integration with ServiceNow, Workday, and Salesforce, and all kinds of applications, not only for business apps but also for consumer apps. We already have over 1,000 apps published in the marketplace. So we are going to double down on our Zoom App ecosystem. Essentially, that's the future for our platform play.

"And down the road, let's say, you have a lot of new applications or existing integrations, you have many ways to monetise down the road. The goal is to offer a people-centric Zoom interface for other applications to be integrated into Zoom."

Total Zoom revenue for the fiscal year was $2,651.4 million, up 326% year-over-year. Zoom projects FY2022 total revenue of $3.760 billion-$3.780 billion.

See also: HSBC writes down $1.3 billion in “software intangibles”, vows accelerated tech investment.

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