"In the final analysis, it created another typical scene of "using technology to improve efficiency"." Hillhouse Capital founder Zhang Lei commented on the American office video company Zoom.
Zoom is one of the most proud masterpieces of his investment career. The epidemic has promoted the rapid growth of Zoom's revenue. Its 2021 fiscal year semi-annual report revenue jumped directly to US$992 million, a 3.7 times increase from the same period last year. Zhang Lei, who had already entered the venture capital stage, made a fortune with this.
Slack has always positioned itself as the internal collaboration software of the enterprise, with a fairly single scope of application; while Zoom and Teams can be used in a wider range of use scenarios such as remote education, remote fitness, and cross-institutional collaboration. This is also the key reason why the number of users of Zoom and Teams has doubled during the epidemic. Slack has always focused on the enterprise market, rather than a product for ordinary users.
Why does Zoom adjust its sales channels in the Chinese market? Why push for multiple partners, but only retain 2 sales agents? Does the channel for purchasing Zoom video accounts shrink? Is it convenient to rent the official international version of Zoom? They are all problems, which are worth pondering.
Why does Slack want to sell itself as an industry giant? Despite the market value of US$20 billion, Slack is still a weak company compared with Microsoft, which has a market value of US$1.6 trillion. Slack is even more weak in the face of Microsoft's dominant Office component bundling pressure. After being left far behind by Teams and Zoom during the epidemic, it has been difficult for Slack to gain the upper hand in the competition. After entering the Salesforce banner, Slack can not only enjoy the financial support of Salesforce, but also integrate with many popular software of Salesforce to achieve group combat advantages.
Unfortunately, when it went public on Nasdaq last year, Slack did not choose the traditional initial public offering (IPO), but took the maverick path of direct listing. Direct listing does not require the issuance of new shares or the need to raise funds, so there is no need to go through processes such as underwriting, roadshows and inquiry, and existing shareholders do not need to be restricted by the lock-up period. Usually only companies that are confident in their business prospects and can be valued by the capital market will go public in this way, including Spotify, Slack and Palantir.
accidentally wrestled to abandon the acquisition of Twitter, making Zoom the absolute hegemon in the video conferencing industry. In China's online conferencing market, Zoom is a well-deserved unicorn.
But for Salesforce, which has a history of 21 years, the acquisition of Slack is not only the largest acquisition so far, but also a new milestone in business development. The reason Salesforce and Slack can hit it off is that both companies have a common competitor: Microsoft. After the acquisition of Slack, Salesforce will formally make up for the shortcomings of the enterprise collaboration IM platform, which Benioff has longed for for many years.
Zoom China’s sales market has been adjusted, authorized agents have changed, have the channels for purchasing Zoom video conferencing changed?
Of course not. Zoom has a huge user base in China. The preferred video conferencing platform for international conferences is naturally Zoom, which is the only choice for global conference interconnection. You can purchase the international version of the account by looking for an official Zoom agent in China.
Salesforce has long seen opportunities in this area and has continued to invest. As early as 2010, Salesforce also launched its own corporate social platform Chatter. In 2016, they also bought Quip, a cloud office startup, for $750 million. But these efforts have not been effective. Benioff also bid for LinkedIn with Microsoft in 2016, but in the end Microsoft won the professional social platform for $26.2 billion, which made Benioff very disappointed. The more interesting episode of
is that after the failed bid for LinkedIn, Benioff, who was anxious, even targeted Twitter. Twitter for ordinary users is not in line with Salesforce’s corporate marketing strategy, so this transaction was generally opposed by Salesforce executives, but Benioff insisted on pushing it forward.Acquisition. However, on the way to the meeting room to discuss how to implement the acquisition, Benioff suddenly fell with garlic under his feet, and blood was still bleeding on his legs. He regarded this accident as a signal from heaven to warn him not to be impulsive, and decided to abandon the acquisition by following the recommendations of the company's management. The reason for
is simple. Zoom has a huge user base in China. The preferred video conferencing platform for international conferences is naturally Zoom. It is the only option for global conference interconnection. You can purchase the international version of the account by looking for an official Zoom agent in China.
