Connect with us

Published

on

In this article

Zoom founder Eric Yuan poses in front of the Nasdaq building as the screen shows the logo of the video-conferencing software company Zoom after the opening bell ceremony on April 18, 2019 in New York City. The video-conferencing software company announced it’s IPO priced at $36 per share, at an estimated value of $9.2 billion.
Kena Betancur | Getty Images

Salesforce needed 14 years as a public company to reach a market cap of $100 billion. Getting there required three multibillion-dollar acquisitions and four distinct revenue sources.

When Zoom topped the $100 billion mark last year, it had been public for just over 14 months. The company was reliant on a single product and had completed just one tiny acquisition.

While it’s still just a toddler on the Nasdaq, Zoom is now being forced to take on adult responsibilities for investors, thanks to its unexpectedly rapid ascent. The video chat company’s historic growth during the Covid-19 pandemic vaulted its market cap from $9.2 billion at the time of its 2019 IPO to a peak of $159 billion in October, putting it tentatively even with Cisco.

Zoom has lost about one-third of its value since then, despite reporting 191% revenue growth in the latest quarter, as investors prepare for a post-pandemic future and as competition picks up, most notably from Microsoft Teams.

Still, Zoom is among the 25-most valuable North American tech companies and the only one in that pack to go public in the last four years. Shopify and Snap, which went public in 2015 and 2017, respectively, are the only companies in the group that trade for a richer multiple to sales.

In other words, the stock market is giving Zoom the tools to become a major dealmaker. And Zoom is taking advantage, announcing earlier this week the $14.7 billion purchase of Five9, which sells cloud-based software to call centers.

“It allows them to use their currency to buy things that are impactful,” said Alfred Chuang, a partner at venture firm Race Capital who previously co-founded BEA Systems and sold it to Oracle for $8.5 billion in 2008. “I can’t imagine this will be last one.”

The Five9 deal is one of the 10 largest U.S. enterprise software transactions on record, according to FactSet, and is bigger than any acquisition ever by Amazon, Google, Oracle, Cisco or Adobe. At about 23 times Five9’s expected 2022 revenue, it’s also the second-priciest software deal on a price-to-sales basis, behind only Salesforce’s $27 billion purchase of Slack, which closed earlier this month.

Chuang, who has been friends with Zoom CEO Eric Yuan since his pre-Zoom days at WebEx, says Yuan is now in a position familiar to Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, whose company has more than doubled in value since mid-2018 to $240 billion.

Both companies are set up to be cloud consolidators as automation changes the future of work and the enterprise software stack of the future gets built, Chuang said. In the three years since reaching a $100 billion market cap, Salesforce has completed four billion-dollar-plus deals, including Slack and the $15.7 billion purchase of Tableau.

“Not everything has worked out,” Chuang said, but he argues it’s important to take take big swings, even if the business is currently in good shape.

“When you have a very fast-growing company and become very successful, most people don’t want to rock the boat,” he said. “Acquisitions are not only useful to acquire customers but are super critical to satisfy a product vision you may have.”

The Cisco connection

Zoom’s initial talks with Five9 date back to last year, according to people familiar with the matter. The CEOs, who both previously worked on collaboration products at Cisco, know each other well and forged a product integration in 2019, when Zoom launched a phone offering.

Yuan was a lead engineer at WebEx when the company was acquired by Cisco in 2007, and Five9 CEO Rowan Trollope ran all of Cisco’s collaboration products, including WebEx, until taking the Five9 job in 2018. They never overlapped at Cisco — Yuan left to start Zoom a year before Trollope joined — but the connection is key as they both saw the challenges of retrofitting a legacy technology company for the cloud era.

Acquisition talks cooled for a while and picked up in the last three months, said people with knowledge of the transaction, who asked not to be named because the discussions were confidential. That’s when Goldman Sachs started advising Zoom on a deal and Five9 hired Frank Quattrone’s Qatalyst Partners.

Zoom also shuffled internal responsibilities this year, putting CFO Kelly Steckelberg in charge of business development, a job that had previously been held by operating chief Aparna Bawa, people close to the matter said. Yuan and Steckelberg drove the Five9 deal, the people said.

Bawa has assumed increased responsibilities elsewhere in the business. She oversees security, privacy and government relations, which all took center stage as Zoom became a widely-used service at large enterprises as well as in education, health care and among religious organizations.

Representatives from Zoom and Five9 declined to comment.

At a Morgan Stanley investor event in March, Steckelberg was asked about Zoom’s plans for the call center.

“Contact center is an absolutely really important part of the phone strategy,” Steckelberg said in response. “The way we approach that today is through partnering. We have great relationships with Five9. Eric and Rowan are very good friends.”

Zoom’s goal is to be not only a video service used for meetings with co-workers and clients, but to become the center of all work communication, including for customer service reps in call centers.

Yuan went a step further in June on Zoom’s quarterly earnings call. He responded to an analyst’s question about contact center expansion by telling investors, “Stay tuned, you will see something.” He followed by suggesting that details could be revealed around the time of the company’s Zoomtopia conference in September.

“I hope we will be able to do more,” he said, indicating that Zoom may go beyond integrations with call center technology providers.

Buy vs. build

A big reason why an agreement took so long to come together was because both stocks were so volatile, people familiar with the talks said. Shares of Zoom and Five9 moved 10% or more in a single week on several occasions this year, making it difficult to come to terms. Ultimately, the acquisition price was a modest 13% premium to Five9’s last closing price before the announcement.

The deal is projected to close in the first half of 2022 and Trollope will continue to run Five9 as a president of Zoom. Five9 adds a projected $650 million in revenue next year to the $4.8 billion in sales that analysts expect from Zoom, according to StreetAccount.

On the investor call following the announcement, Yuan and Trollope said that common customers have been telling them they want to count on a single vendor that can provide communications technology for internal purposes as well as customer service. Zoom could invest in building the product itself, but customers “do not want to wait,” Yuan said.

Analysts like BTIG’s Matt VanVliet said the decision to buy instead of build is the right one.

“Overall, we are encouraged by Zoom’s strategy to supercharge its platform with this acquisition rather than rely purely on its own internal R&D chops, which would have taken years to scale,” wrote VanVliet, who has a buy recommendation on Zoom, in a report on July 19.

Zoom has a long way to go before it can claim to have a portfolio of cloud software products, like Salesforce, Adobe and ServiceNow.

Late last year, the company entered the live events space with the launch of a homegrown product called OnZoom, expanding the video platform beyond the workplace and betting that online gatherings, in some form, are here to stay. In July, Zoom hired Abhisht Arora, a 21-year Microsoft veteran and Teams program manager, as its head of corporate strategy, reporting directly to Yuan.

Between development of new products and big acquisitions into parallel markets, Yuan is trying to ensure that Zoom is more than just a pandemic stock, and that its status as an enterprise giant remains long after we say goodbye to Covid-19.

— CNBC’s Alex Sherman contributed to this report.

WATCH: Zoom’s acquisition of Five9 is a ‘steal of a deal,’ says analyst

Continue Reading

Technology

Etsy touts ‘shopping domestically’ as Trump tariffs threaten price increases for imports

Published

on

By

Etsy touts 'shopping domestically' as Trump tariffs threaten price increases for imports

An employee walks past a quilt displaying Etsy Inc. signage at the company’s headquarters in the Brooklyn.

Victor J. Blue/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Etsy is trying to make it easier for shoppers to purchase products from local merchants and avoid the extra cost of imports as President Donald Trump’s sweeping tariffs raise concerns about soaring prices.

In a post to Etsy’s website on Thursday, CEO Josh Silverman said the company is “surfacing new ways for buyers to discover businesses in their countries” via shopping pages and by featuring local sellers on its website and app.

“While we continue to nurture and enable cross-border trade on Etsy, we understand that people are increasingly interested in shopping domestically,” Silverman said.

Etsy operates an online marketplace that connects buyers and sellers with mostly artisanal and handcrafted goods. The site, which had 5.6 million active sellers as of the end of December, competes with e-commerce juggernaut Amazon, as well as newer entrants that have ties to China like Temu, Shein and TikTok Shop.

By highlighting local sellers, Etsy could relieve some shoppers from having to pay higher prices induced by President Trump’s widespread tariffs on trade partners. Trump has imposed tariffs on most foreign countries, with China facing a rate of 145%, and other nations facing 10% rates after he instituted a 90-day pause to allow for negotiations. Trump also signed an executive order that will end the de minimis provision, a loophole for low-value shipments often used by online businesses, on May 2.

Temu and Shein have already announced they plan to raise prices late next week in response to the tariffs. Sellers on Amazon’s third-party marketplace, many of whom source their products from China, have said they’re considering raising prices.

Silverman said Etsy has provided guidance for its sellers to help them “run their businesses with as little disruption as possible” in the wake of tariffs and changes to the de minimis exemption.

Before Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs took effect, Silverman said on the company’s fourth-quarter earnings call in late February that he expects Etsy to benefit from the tariffs and de minimis restrictions because it “has much less dependence on products coming in from China.”

“We’re doing whatever work we can do to anticipate and prepare for come what may,” Silverman said at the time. “In general, though, I think Etsy will be more resilient than many of our competitors in these situations.”

Still, American shoppers may face higher prices on Etsy as U.S. businesses that source their products or components from China pass some of those costs on to consumers.

Etsy shares are down 17% this year, slightly more than the Nasdaq.

WATCH: Amazon CEO Andy Jassy says sellers will pass cost of tariffs on to consumers

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy: Sellers will pass increased tariff costs on to consumers

Continue Reading

Technology

Google hit with second antitrust blow, adding to concerns about future of ads business

Published

on

By

Google hit with second antitrust blow, adding to concerns about future of ads business

Google CEO Sundar Pichai testifies before the House Judiciary Committee at the Rayburn House Office Building on December 11, 2018 in Washington, DC.

Alex Wong | Getty Images

Google’s antitrust woes are continuing to mount, just as the company tries to brace for a future dominated by artificial intelligence.

On Thursday, a federal judge ruled that Google held illegal monopolies in online advertising markets due to its position between ad buyers and sellers.

The ruling, which followed a September trial in Alexandria, Virginia, represents a second major antitrust blow for Google in under a year. In August, a judge determined the company has held a monopoly in its core market of internet search, the most-significant antitrust ruling in the tech industry since the case against Microsoft more than 20 years ago. 

Google is in a particularly precarious spot as it tries to simultaneously defend its primary business in court while fending off an onslaught of new competition due to the emergence of generative AI, most notably OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which offers users alternative ways to search for information. Revenue growth has cooled in recent years, and Google also now faces the added potential of a slowdown in ad spending due to economic concerns from President Donald Trump’s sweeping new tariffs.

Parent company Alphabet reports first-quarter results next week. Alphabet’s stock price dipped more than 1% on Thursday and is now down 20% this year.

Why Google's antitrust woes endangers its AI momentum

In Thursday’s ruling, U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema said Google’s anticompetitive practices “substantially harmed” publishers and users on the web. The trial featured 39 live witnesses, depositions from an additional 20 witnesses and hundreds of exhibits.

Judge Brinkema ruled that Google unlawfully controls two of the three parts of the advertising technology market: the publisher ad server market and ad exchange market. Brinkema dismissed the third part of the case, determining that tools used for general display advertising can’t clearly be defined as Google’s own market. In particular, the judge cited the purchases of DoubleClick and Admeld and said the government failed to show those “acquisitions were anticompetitive.”

“We won half of this case and we will appeal the other half,” Lee-Anne Mulholland, Google’s vice president or regulatory affairs, said in an emailed statement. “We disagree with the Court’s decision regarding our publisher tools. Publishers have many options and they choose Google because our ad tech tools are simple, affordable and effective.”

Attorney General Pam Bondi said in a press release from the DOJ that the ruling represents a “landmark victory in the ongoing fight to stop Google from monopolizing the digital public square.”

Potential ad disruption

If regulators force the company to divest parts of the ad-tech business, as the Justice Department has requested, it could open up opportunities for smaller players and other competitors to fill the void and snap up valuable market share. Amazon has been growing its ad business in recent years.

Meanwhile, Google is still defending itself against claims that its search has acted as a monopoly by creating strong barriers to entry and a feedback loop that sustained its dominance. Google said in August, immediately after the search case ruling, that it would appeal, meaning the matter can play out in court for years even after the remedies are determined.

The remedies trial, which will lay out the consequences, begins next week. The Justice Department is aiming for a break up of Google’s Chrome browser and eliminating exclusive agreements, like its deal with Apple for search on iPhones. The judge is expected to make the ruling by August.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai (L) and Apple CEO Tim Cook (R) listen as U.S. President Joe Biden speaks during a roundtable with American and Indian business leaders in the East Room of the White House on June 23, 2023 in Washington, DC.

Anna Moneymaker | Getty Images

After the ad market ruling on Thursday, Gartner’s Andrew Frank said Google’s “conflicts of interest” are apparent by how the market runs.

“The structure has been decades in the making,” Frank said, adding that “untangling that would be a significant challenge, particularly since lawyers don’t tend to be system architects.”

However, the uncertainty that comes with a potentially years-long appeals process means many publishers and advertisers will be waiting to see how things shake out before making any big decisions given how much they rely on Google’s technology.

“Google will have incentives to encourage more competition possibly by loosening certain restrictions on certain media it controls, YouTube being one of them,” Frank said. “Those kind of incentives may create opportunities for other publishers or ad tech players.”

A date for the remedies trial hasn’t been set.

Damian Rollison, senior director of market insights for marketing platform Soci, said the revenue hit from the ad market case could be more dramatic than the impact from the search case.

“The company stands to lose a lot more in material terms if its ad business, long its main source of revenue, is broken up,” Rollison said in an email. “Whereas divisions like Chrome are more strategically important.”

WATCH: U.S. judge finds Google holds illegal online ad-tech monopolies

U.S. judge finds Google holds illegal online ad tech monopolies

Continue Reading

Technology

Discord sued by New Jersey over child safety features

Published

on

By

Discord sued by New Jersey over child safety features

Jason Citron, CEO of Discord in Washington, DC, on January 31, 2024.

Andrew Caballero-Reynolds | AFP | Getty Images

The New Jersey attorney general sued Discord on Thursday, alleging that the company misled consumers about child safety features on the gaming-centric social messaging app.

The lawsuit, filed in the New Jersey Superior Court by Attorney General Matthew Platkin and the state’s division of consumer affairs, alleges that Discord violated the state’s consumer fraud laws.

Discord did so, the complaint said, by allegedly “misleading children and parents from New Jersey” about safety features, “obscuring” the risks children face on the platform and failing to enforce its minimum age requirement.

“Discord’s strategy of employing difficult to navigate and ambiguous safety settings to lull parents and children into a false sense of safety, when Discord knew well that children on the Application were being targeted and exploited, are unconscionable and/or abusive commercial acts or practices,” lawyers wrote in the legal filing.

They alleged that Discord’s acts and practices were “offensive to public policy.”

A Discord spokesperson said in a statement that the company disputes the allegations and that it is “proud of our continuous efforts and investments in features and tools that help make Discord safer.”

“Given our engagement with the Attorney General’s office, we are surprised by the announcement that New Jersey has filed an action against Discord today,” the spokesperson said.

One of the lawsuit’s allegations centers around Discord’s age-verification process, which the plaintiffs believe is flawed, writing that children under thirteen can easily lie about their age to bypass the app’s minimum age requirement.

The lawsuit also alleges that Discord misled parents to believe that its so-called Safe Direct Messaging feature “was designed to automatically scan and delete all private messages containing explicit media content.” The lawyers claim that Discord misrepresented the efficacy of that safety tool.

“By default, direct messages between ‘friends’ were not scanned at all,” the complaint stated. “But even when Safe Direct Messaging filters were enabled, children were still exposed to child sexual abuse material, videos depicting violence or terror, and other harmful content.”

The New Jersey attorney general is seeking unspecified civil penalties against Discord, according to the complaint.

The filing marks the latest lawsuit brought by various state attorneys general around the country against social media companies.

In 2023, a bipartisan coalition of over 40 state attorneys general sued Meta over allegations that the company knowingly implemented addictive features across apps like Facebook and Instagram that harm the mental well being of children and young adults.

The New Mexico attorney general sued Snap in Sep. 2024 over allegations that Snapchat’s design features have made it easy for predators to easily target children through sextortion schemes.

The following month, a bipartisan group of over a dozen state attorneys general filed lawsuits against TikTok over allegations that the app misleads consumers that its safe for children. In one particular lawsuit filed by the District of Columbia’s attorney general, lawyers allege that the ByteDance-owned app maintains a virtual currency that “substantially harms children” and a  livestreaming feature that “exploits them financially.”

In January 2024, executives from Meta, TikTok, Snap, Discord and X were grilled by lawmakers during a senate hearing over allegations that the companies failed to protect children on their respective social media platforms.

WATCH: The FTC has an uphill battle in its antitrust case against Meta.

The FTC has an uphill battle in its antitrust case against Meta: Former Facebook general counsel

Continue Reading

Trending