Will Zoom Ever Soar Again?

livemint.com:

Nobody expects much from Zoom Video Communications these days. Sometimes that works to the company’s advantage. The videoconferencing wunderkind that shot to fame during the early days of the pandemic has been experiencing a long and painful comedown since.

Revenue growth has been in the low single-digit percentage range for the last six quarters, culminating in just 2.6% growth for the fiscal year ended January, according to the company’s fourth-quarter results reported late Monday. That makes Zoom the slowest growing among cloud-software companies generating more than $1 billion in annual revenue, according to data from S&P Global Market Intelligence. Workday—a notably larger cloud provider—said Monday that its annual revenue grew nearly 17% over the same period.

Zoom hasn’t even been able to break into the market’s artificial-intelligence party—despite its best efforts. The company announced a generative AI tool called Zoom AI Companion in September, and said less than two months later that more than 125,000 of its customers were using it. But Zoom’s stock price has slumped nearly 7% over the last six months—a notable laggard on the BVP Nasdaq Emerging Cloud Index that has jumped nearly 16% in that time.

A weak stock at least set a better stage for Zoom’s quarterly results Monday. The shares jumped more than 10% in after-hours trading following the report and conference call, which is a nice change considering the stock has fallen after 10 of the last 12 reports, according to FactSet. Zoom’s adjusted operating income for the quarter beat Wall Street’s targets while billings—a measure of business transacted during the period—exceeded analysts’ forecasts by the widest margin in a year.