India is Zoom’s second-largest market after US: CEO Eric Yuan

Zoom was built to serve business customers.

India is the second-largest market after the US in terms of visitors for popular videoconferencing platform Zoom, its founder & CEO Eric S Yuan said on Friday. This comes at a time when the NASDAQ-listed company is planning to open a technology centre in Bengaluru to expand its presence in the country and will hire key talents over the next few years.

“I want to say special thanks to our users in India. In terms of the number of visitors, India is second-largest country. The US is number one followed by India, Japan, UK and Canada,” Yuan said at an event organised by The IndUS Entrepreneurs (TiE).

The US-headquartered company, which offers 40 minutes of free video calling, has 21 offices globally, including India, UK, and Japan. A major part of its workforce, however, is based in the US. The company has a network of 18 data centres.

On Zoom’s expansion prospects globally, especially in India, Yuan said, “Prior to the pandemic, most of our revenue came from North America driven by the US and Canada and a little bit by Europe.”

One of the founding engineers of another famous video conferencing service, Webex, Yuan explained that Zoom was “essentially” a videoconferencing infrastructure over which third-party developers or start-ups could build all kinds of applications.

Yuan expressed strong optimism on the future prospects of videoconferencing and web conferencing solutions. According to research firm Gartner, Asia Pacific is expected to dominate the global videoconferencing market for the next six-seven years, aided by growth of multinational corporations in India, China, and Japan.

On security and privacy, Yuan said, “Zoom was built to serve business customers. Over the past years we have introduced lots of security features. Lots of top worldwide security companies are our customers. However, this pandemic changed our user dynamics. We now have a lot of first-time users. When the crisis hit, we decided it’s our corporate social responsibility to care about our users.”

Yuan also emphasised on his strong connection with India, stating that the company’s chief operating officer as well as president of product and engineering have Indian roots.

“Former Webex cofounder Subrah Iyer is my investor and mentor for many years. My middle name S (Eric S Yuan) is also from him as he and his wife are very good at Indian astrology and that’s why I got this middle name back in 1998,” Yuan revealed.