Techong's Global Research: Zoom and Slack, how are they winners of COVID-19?

It has been almost nine months of living in new normal life after the world was hit by COVID-19, another pandemic disease originated from Wuhan. Wearing a mask is required whether it is indoors or outdoors. Social distancing by staying meter apart from each other seems likely to be granted. "We are living in post COVID-19 era. Life has changed from the past and will change continuously. It is just a matter that the pandemic has triggered it."

During the pandemic rise in Europe and U.S., people were staying at home isolated. At first, it was not very easy to stay at home without any contacts from their acquaintances. As the pandemic lasts longer than expected, people started to enjoy themselves at home. Eating at home, shopping through e-commerce, in-house workouts, etc became new normal. The most noticeable change after COVID-19 was working from home.

Zoom Video Communications and Slack Technologies were one of the companies that attracted most attention during pandemic. They both are the software companies for the companies. Zoom is more of video conference service, Slack is more of communication service through chatting. The common thing was that they are both in favor of contactless business. They both were listed in 2019 in U.S. stock exchange which made their debut to the investors. (Slack had direct listing after Spotify)

Then how were their performances after the rise of COVID-19?

Zoom

The revenue was $663.5 million in the July quarter, which is up from $145.8 million last year, positing a profit of $185.7 million. Shares have risen about 400% from January due to the benefits of remote works. Small and medium companies contributed about 36% of sales of total revenue. Since furloughs from the companies were massive, so people started to work at home as a freelancer which also benefited platforms like Shiftpixy and Fiverr International. They had to use video conference for the business or job interviews. Zoom once had trouble with securities which later made them acquire Keybase to support its cyber safety.

Slack

Revenue for quarterly sales of Slack was $215.90 million which has beat estimates of $209.10 million. This is about 48.92% incline over sales of $144.97 million the same period last year. However, shares has not significantly increased for the worries of competitors of Microsoft, Facebook, and Cisco. Slack is very useful when there are many staffs in the company since the software is very convenient for chatting and sharing the files and document. However, as unemployment started to rise, companies were less inclined to adopt new technologies like Slack services and started spending less during the economic downturn.

Zoom and Slack are both specialized to the business whether it is at work or at home. But Zoom is more convenient to individuals who are remote workers, while Slack is mostly B2B business. If a company cuts off their staff, then there is no reason to use chatting software like Slack which has high technology. However, when the economy recovers and remote working becomes more adopted, then Zoom and Slack can be good for investment in the future.