Zoom earnings soar as video meets become pandemic norm
SAN FRANCISCO, United States — Zoom on Tuesday reported that its earnings soared as its video-meeting service became a popular way to work or socialize while hunkered down due to the pandemic.
Zoom said it made a profit of $27 million on revenue that leapt 169 percent to slightly more than $328 million in the first three months of this year.
In the first quarter last year, Zoom reported zero dollars per share in net income for stockholders.
"The COVID-19 crisis has driven higher demand for distributed, face-to-face interactions and collaboration using Zoom," founder and chief executive Eric Yuan said in a release.
"Use cases have grown rapidly as people integrated Zoom into their work, learning, and personal lives."
Zoom shares that ended the formal trading day up nearly two percent, topping $200, climbed another three percent in after-market trades.
The quarter ended with Zoom having approximately 265,400 paying customers with at least 10 employees each in an increase of 354 percent from the first quarter in 2019, according to the company based in the Silicon Valley city of San Jose.
The earnings come with Zoom under pressure to deal with security and privacy as the platform faces scrutiny from rising usage.
New York state's top prosecutor last month announced that Zoom would improve security measures, after flaws were detected as the video conferencing platform soared in popularity amid the coronavirus pandemic.
The agreement ended an investigation launched in March by New York Attorney General Letitia James into vulnerabilities in the company's software.
Zoom recently launched a philanthropic foundation with initial grants to San Jose Digital Inclusion Fund , Destination Home, the CDC Foundation , the World Health Organization and the CDE Foundation.
The latest news about Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other social media platforms.
Messaging app Telegram will launch pay-for services in 2021, its Russian-born founder Pavel Durov says Wednesday, as the growing company needed "at least a few hundred million dollars per year".
"Telegram will begin to generate revenue, starting next year," he says in a statement. "We will be able to launch countless new features and welcome billions of new users." — AFP
The Bureau of Immigration has issued a ban on employees posting content on TikTok of them dancing or performing social media challenges while in uniform.
Immigration Commissioner Jaime Morente says in a press release that the prohibition "was imposed to strictly enforce the bureau's regulations on the wearing of the BI uniform, whose integrity must be upheld at all times because it represents the institution of the Philippine immigration service."
"Our policy on the wearing of the BI uniform is clear. As public servants and supposed model Filipinos, employees must proudly wear their uniform at all times, present a professional image to the public and observe proper decorum and good taste in all their actions while they are on duty," he also says.
A souce says shortform video app TikTok and the Trump administration had not come to terms over sale of the company's US operations late Friday as a deadline loomed.
The Committee on Foreign Investment had given TikTok parent ByteDance, based in China, until midnight to come up with an acceptable deal to put TikTok's American assets into US hands.
Talks between TikTok and government negotiators will continue even after the deadline passes, and people in the US will still be able to use the popular smartphone app for sharing video snippets, the source says. — AFP
Twitter on Tuesday rebuffs Australian calls to remove a Beijing official's incendiary tweet targeting Australian troops, as China doubled down on criticism in the face of mounting international condemnation.
Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian sparked outrage in Canberra on Monday when he posted a staged image of a man dressed as an Australian soldier holding a bloody knife to an Afghan child's throat.
The post came just days after Australian prosecutors launched an investigation into 19 members of the country's military over alleged war crimes committed in Afghanistan between 2005 and 2016.
Twitter says it had marked the tweet as "sensitive," but adds that comments on topical political issues or "foreign policy sabre-rattling" by official government accounts were generally not in violation of its rules. — AFP
Facebook and Google are fast becoming "human rights-free zones" in Vietnam, Amnesty International warns Tuesday, accusing the tech titans of helping censor peaceful dissent and political expression in the country.
Communist Vietnam has long jailed its critics but has come under fire in recent years for targeting users on Facebook, a popular forum for activists in the country where all independent media is banned.
The social network admitted earlier this year that it was blocking content deemed illegal by authorities, while its latest transparency report revealed a nearly 1,000-percent increase in the content it censors on government orders compared to the previous six months.
Amnesty said in a Tuesday report that it had interviewed 11 activists whose content had been restricted from view in Vietnam by Facebook this year. — AFP
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